C&W CEO Expects "Full Recovery" of Office Employment Next Year
Around 2.2 million of the 2.9 million office jobs lost as the result of the pandemic have been recovered.
Cushman & Wakefield CEO Brett White said the firm expects a “full recovery” of office employment by the middle of this year, two years from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In remarks on CNBC’s Squawk On The Street, White said rents will trough out and begin to improve by the middle of 2022, while vacancies will peak around that same time period before beginning an upswing.
Around 2.2 million of the 2.9 million office jobs lost as the result of the pandemic have been recovered, and Cushman data show that office space tours were up 80% from January to May.
“We’re seeing a lot of return to employment which augurs for a good outlook to the short and mid term year,” White told CNBC.
White credits increasingly widespread vaccination adoption as a key driver for the return to physical office space, saying April was a critical inflection point as vaccine availability became more ubiquitous.
“With the really rapid change around mandating vaccines at the workplace, we’re seeing as you know every hour another large company saying they’re going to mandate vaccines…that’s also a huge supporter making people feel safe coming back to the office,” White said.
The office environment will need to change in configuration and tech capacity, White said, with strategic changes geared toward making employee feel safe and excited to return to work.
“Companies are thinking about space very differently,” he told CNBC. “Companies realize the office needs to be a place that attracts people…and a place that’s rich in technology that helps the tenant experience within the buildings.”
White’s remarks come as a litany of large companies have announced delays in their return to work plans as the result of the Delta variant. Twitter has closed its recently reopened offices in San Francisco and New York and will indefinitely postpone other reopening plans, as GlobeSt previously reported, and Apple has pushed its return date a month. Meanwhile, Google has extended its remote work policy until mid-October.