Manhattan Offices 29% Busier on Mondays Compared to Last Year
By Abigail Nehring August 12, 2024 5:54 pm
reprints
Manhattan landlords don’t care if Monday’s blue, as long as office workers come into work.
And more workers are doing that this year as select offices across the borough were 29.3 percent busier on Mondays in June compared to the same time last year, according to a new report by brokerage Avison Young and analytics firm Placer.ai.
It’s not just Mondays that look good for the borough as Manhattan outpaced the rest of the country by 15 percent overall on office “busyness,” an index Avison Young launched last month measuring office visitation in high-occupancy buildings and how long people stay inside. Manhattan scored 76.6 percent in office busyness — or building utilization — in June, compared to a national average of 61.9 percent, according to the report.
“Over the last 12 to 18 months, [return-to-office] policies have been cemented,” said Danny Mangru, senior manager of U.S. office market intelligence at Avison Young. “What we’re looking at right now is probably a very clear picture of what things are going to be towards the end of the year.”
The index uses June 2019 as a baseline, and shows just how far the nation’s largest office market has recovered since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Manhattan office busyness fell to 6.4 percent in April 2020, a lower score than the overall U.S. office market’s 11 percent that month.
Two sectors in particular have played an outsized role in Manhattan’s resurgence since the pandemic.
Consulting firm offices are actually 24.1 percent busier now than they were before the pandemic, according to the data. And the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector is close behind, at 90.1 percent of its 2019 office busyness level.
Those results were no surprise to Mangru, who said, “The backbone of the Manhattan market has always been the FIRE sector.”
Looking just at trends over the past year, law firms have also become more a hive of activity. The legal sector has been driving office leasing in the borough and it shows in the data, with law firms climbing 24.7 percent in office busyness since June 2023.
The data, which excludes buildings with occupancy lower than 70 percent and office properties being converted to residential, gives a picture of what the market will look like after the dust has settled on companies’ return-to-office policies, according to Mangru.
“This is the new norm,” Mangru said. “I think there’s a lot of optimism here.”
Abigail Nehring can be reached at anehring@commercialobserver.com.
