by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Sky-high availability rates. The gap between “asking rents” and “effective rents” widened further amid hefty concessions, free rent, and lower “taking rents.” Tenants have negotiating power.
Office markets had issues before the pandemic. For example, the Oil Bust made Houston the worst office market in the US starting in 2015. And a construction boom across the US put large amounts of office space on the market, under the calculus of insatiable demand. But during the pandemic, companies determined they wouldn’t need that much office space under their hybrid work-from-home models and dumped empty office space on the sublease market.