We will all remember the year 2020 for innumerate reasons. The coronavirus pandemic, historic unemployment levels, a highly divisive election, and civil unrest all shared the headlines in a year none of us will soon forget. 

2020 was also the year that many office employees and their employers discovered that they could complete their responsibilities remotely, as COVID-19 protocols limited face-to-face contact and emptied workplaces. Yet as our nation returns to normalcy with improved pandemic procedures, antiviral technologies and a rising vaccination rate, offices are once again filling with employees. Southwest Florida, in fact, is setting the pace for a resurgence in commercial office space.

When the pandemic shut down offices across the nation, millions of jobs were lost either temporarily or permanently. In just two months during the second quarter of 2020, 2.86 million office-using jobs were lost, part of the biggest decline in the history of U.S. payroll employment.  Since then, well over half of those jobs have been recovered, and Cushman & Wakefield projects that the office employment market will have fully recovered by July of this year.