With New York City set to reopen fully in July, and many companies expecting to summon workers back this summer and fall, those in commercial real estate are hoping that the rebirth they’ve tried to hasten may finally happen, the New York Times reported. The industry, coming off a boom of continuous growth, has seen commissions fall off as vacancy rates have climbed to their highest levels in decades. Real estate executives, characteristically bullish on their prospects, are facing existential questions. Offices have long been something of a tautology: Companies have needed offices because to be a company, you had to have an office. But more than a year of forced work-from-home for corporate America has upended that truism, leaving some CFOs running the numbers on potential savings in rent and some employees loath to return to life as it was. Commercial real estate is a business populated mostly by chest-thumping optimists. It is not geared toward the circumspect, the timid or the tepid. But with 1.3 billion square feet of office space available across America’s top markets, strains in rosy projections are showing. For now, the brokers are doing all they can: taking showings to Zoom; sweetening deals and offering leases with more wiggle room; embracing the idea of a more flexible workplace while betting that won’t backfire; and marketing the office as a place to which people want to return — if not for a full business week.
