A recent opinion piece in Bloomberg by Justin Fox, author of The Myth of the Rational Market, discussed the shrinking amout of office space per worker that companies were providing. As a GlobeSt.com analysis suggested, there were a number of factors that created significant caveats in the data. One of them was that using a CoStar analysis as part of the mix might be a problem because the data sets, definitions, and methodologies might not match up with the other sources.

CoStar contacted GlobeSt.com and offered to discuss some of the issues that face working with data in CRE. National Director of US Office Analytics Phil Mobley says that one underlying difficulty is having to intersect the office space market with the workplace world where things actually happen.

"There are a couple of things that are clear," Mobley says. "Office-using occupations are occupying less space per worker." But then he clarifies the "very strict sense" in which CoStar uses the term occupying. An organization has physical control of a space. That doesn't necessarily address the number of people working in that space. "When we say they are leasing more or less space per worker, we mean per [absolute count of ] workers. We don't mean per worker that is physically attending."