Offices in New York, nationwide hit peak post-pandemic occupancy

OFFICES in New York and other big US cities last week filled to their highest levels since the pandemic hit, but occupancy still hasn’t surpassed 50 per cent in most places.

New York offices tracked by security firm Kastle Systems were 47.8 per cent full in the week ended Oct 12, up from about 44 per cent in the previous two weeks, each of which had school holidays that kept some workers homebound. That’s the highest occupancy since early March 2020, right before Covid-19 lockdowns took effect. Kastle’s 10-city average occupancy also reached a post-pandemic high, at 49 per cent, boosted by cities such as Austin, Texas, where offices are nearly two-thirds full.

Ridership on New York City’s buses and subways has also risen. For example, Metro-North’s trains that shuttle suburban commuters into the city reached 74 per cent of their 2019 average ridership on Oct 11, up from 64 per cent on the same day the week before.

Still, return-to-office (RTO) evangelists like New York City Mayor Eric Adams probably won’t call a parade over these numbers, as New York offices still aren’t even half full despite bosses getting more serious in recent weeks about so-called RTO mandates. A broader analysis of US workers from a consortium of researchers led by Stanford University professor Nick Bloom has found that work patterns are stabilising, with hybrid schedules dominant. Only about one-third of those who are able to work from home are in the office full time, while nearly half are on some form of hybrid schedule, with the rest fully remote.

Working from home is also much more common in major cities than in smaller cities and towns, the Stanford data show. Outside of some large employers such as financial services firms, companies’ efforts to get more people in the office after Labour Day “has had little to no impact”, Bloom said. BLOOMBERG