A new report from Cushman & Wakefield, entitled Obsolescence Equals Opportunity, projects that by 2030 US office inventory will total nearly 5.7B SF—but a flexible, hybrid workforce will only require about 4.6B SF of space.
As a result of what C&W is calling "an impending demand-supply balance," the remaining 1.1B will be vacant at the end of the decade, as office worker "density" declines from the pre-pandemic metric of 190 SF per employee to 165 SF over the next eight years.
Only about a third of the leases scheduled to expire in this decade have come due since 2020, but renewals and extensions are trending sharply in the direction of reduced office footprints compared to pre-pandemic averages.
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