Hybrid working to push US office vacancy to record 1.1bn sq ft

Hybrid working will push US office vacancies to a record 1.1bn sq ft by 2030, Cushman & Wakefield has warned. The forecast states that changing working patterns will push vacancy rates 55% above pre-pandemic levels. The report found that 330m sq ft of office space — roughly equivalent to all the office inventory in the Washington metropolitan area — would be made redundant by hybrid or remote working by the end of the decade. That would come on top of another 740m sq ft that it classified as “normal or natural” vacancy. C&W concluded that roughly a quarter of US office space was already undesirable and another 60% was at risk of obsolescence and might require “significant investment” either to upgrade or repurpose it for other uses “Obsolescence is kind of the word of the day right now,” said C&W president Andrew McDonald, calling the report an acknowledgment of “an inflection point, perhaps”. The FT (£)