Bell Tolling for Open Plan Offices?

Gleb Tsipursky of The Hill reports that a lingering effect of all that telecommuting during the pandemic is that office space remains difficult to rent out.

As a corollary, businesses and owners of office space are learning some lessons about what amenities actually get people to come back to the office:

Free parking may not be flashy, but it's effective. The Chicago Fed report found that vacancy rates for office spaces offering on-site free parking have dropped sharply across U.S. markets since 2020. In Detroit, vacancy rates in these properties "dropped from 5.4 percent in the first quarter of 2019 to 1.3 percent in the final quarter of 2024." Chicago saw a similar drop, from 8.4 percent to 3.6 percent.

Those are staggering numbers, especially in an era when overall office vacancy rates remain high -- at 15.7 percent in Chicago and 12 percent in Detroit, respectively. Parallel surveys from CBRE show parking outpacing gyms, cafés and even transit proximity as the most-desired building amenity. [bold added]

This makes perfect sense: Once you learn how much time commuting eats away, having to waste time parking and getting to the office after driving doesn't help, and that's before the safety issues that arise in many cities.

And if getting time back by working at home makes people leery of bad commuting arrangements, the same holds for being able to, you know, actually work:

At the same time, the report highlights a sharp decline in the desirability of open office layouts.

Once hailed as the future of collaborative work, open floor plans are now strongly associated with rising vacancy rates. In Detroit, properties with open floor designs saw their vacancy rate skyrocket from 5 percent in early 2019 to 30 percent by the end of 2024. In Chicago and across the broader U.S. market, the numbers tell a similar story... [bold added]

A bit later:

Employees now expect the office to offer something their home workspace may lack -- privacy, calm and the ability to focus without interruption.

Ah, competition!

Even if the government had not wrongly enforced "lockdowns" during the pandemic, a desire to avoid being sick or having too many sick employees could conceivably have spurred a rise in people working from home, thanks to our technology being mature enough to make that possible in the way that it did.

In any event, the pandemic arguably hastened the introduction of badly-needed new competition to the office space sector. And now, one can hope that said competition will lead to on-site parking becoming much more common, not to mention open-plan offices heading to the dustbin of history, where they belong.

-- CAV