Tech companies are playing a leading role in the U.S. office market recovery, as they accounted for 36 of the top 100 U.S. office leases in 2021, according to a new report by CBRE. The tech sector claimed a cumulative 11.4 million square feet of the top leases or about 37 percent. This number far outpaced the leasing activity of other sectors such as government and public administration (5.1 million square feet), finance and insurance (3.6 million square feet), and life sciences (1.8 million square feet).
“The tech sector has played a big role in office leasing activity in recent years, and it rebounded in 2021 to rival its pre-pandemic activity,” Manish Kashyap, CBRE Global President of Advisory & Transaction Services, said in a CBRE press release for the report. “Overall, office leasing in the U.S. was up nearly 27 percent last year, and several other indicators of the market’s performance turned positive late in the year. The tech industry is the big engine there.”
CBRE’s report is further evidence commercial office landlords should be targeting tech companies as tenants. The tech sector has been one of the leading, if not the biggest, leasers of office space for more than a decade, and the recent report shows this trend is not slowing down.
Leading commercial brokers advise finding scalable, highly connected spaces focused on wellness and sustainability and accessible 24 hours a day to attract tech companies. CBRE says optimism should be tempered with caution even though the pandemic is easing. But a surge in office leasing activity in late 2021, powered by tech, should bode well for the rest of 2022.
