One of the most lingering aftershocks of the pandemic years has been the work-from-home phenomenon and the slow return to workers back to their offices. In cities across the country, the commercial space vacancy rate has skyrocketed as offices remain empty and companies scale back the size of their spaces.
Slowly but surely, however, workers are getting back to the office, even if how many varies greatly by location. Placer.ai, the tracking service that uses cellphone data to identify where people are and is better known for retail data, is also looking at worker return rates in selected cities and it says those rates are going up. Office visits – which includes both full and part-time returns -- reached 72.2% nationwide of July 2019’s levels, it said.
So, which cities ranked highest? Miami, with a return rate of 90.6 percent and New York, at 89.6 percent, far outranked any of the other major metropolitan areas Placer surveyed. Dallas, DMC’s hometown, ranked next at 76.9 percent, followed by: Atlanta,76.7 percent; Washington, DC 73.9 percent; Boston, 69.5 percent; Chicago, 69.2 percent; Denver, 63.7 percent; Los Angeles, 62.8 percent; and Houston, 57 percent.
Placer did not survey all U.S. cities but among the ones it did, it found the national average to be 72.2 percent. “All 11 analyzed cities experienced year-over-year visit growth in July 2024 – further evidence that the office recovery remains very much underway,” Placer.ai content writer Lila Margalit wrote in a blog post.