Los Angeles Office Recovery Still Distant Despite Strong Leasing Activity
The region’s overall availability stood firm at 28.3%, according to a new Savills report
By Nick Trombola October 3, 2025 1:45 pm
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Greater Los Angeles’ office market has faced high availability rates and weak demand since the pandemic, and a new market analysis indicates a full recovery is still miles downstream.
Roughly 3.5 million square feet of office space was leased across Greater L.A. in the third quarter this year, according to the latest market report from Savills, bringing the year-to-date total to about 10.5 million square feet. That volume level is already higher than any full year since the pandemic.
Most of those leases were under 100,000 square feet, including the L.A. Department of Public Services’ nearly 90,000-square-foot expansion at Omninet’s 1500 Hughes Way in Long Beach, KPMG’s 68,455-square-foot lease Downtown at Silverstein’s U.S. Bank Tower, and Canvas Worldwide’s 68,331-square-foot lease at NSB Associates’ Ascend in El Segundo. The largest lease by far this past quarter was Kaiser Permanente’s 280,147-square-foot renewal at Lincoln Property Company’s 10 West campus in Pasadena.
Yet office availability in the region is still a major hurdle. The overall availability rate — a measure of space that is vacant or soon to be vacant — held steady at 28.3 percent, according to Savills. L.A.’s Miracle Mile neighborhood, Culver City and Marina Del Rey/Play Vista were the worst offenders, each clocking availability rates over 37 percent. L.A. County’s San Gabriel Valley’s rate was the lowest at 12.9 percent. Average asking rents also saw little change, rising just 10 cents this past quarter to an even $4 per square foot per month.
A researcher for Savills was not immediately available to comment further.
The brokerage firm doesn’t expect much improvement in the near future. Demand for new space from entertainment, tech and media companies is projected to stay muted, and access to capital is still bottlenecked as a high debt maturity wall restricts refinancing and redevelopment funding. Even with ongoing flight-to-quality trends, macroeconomic uncertainty means that office-using job growth will have weights on its ankles for the time being, according to Savills.
Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.
