New York City Emerges as Office Recovery Leader Nationwide

The recovery of the office market in New York City (NYC) is still very much underway, but according to a white paper recently published by Placer.ai, in 2024, the city “cemented its position as the nationwide leader in office recovery. Helping to fuel progress are companies ranging from JPMorgan to Amazon, which have doubled down on return-to-office (RTO) mandates. Visits to New York City’s office buildings were just 13.1% below pre-pandemic (2019) levels, compared to a negative 34.3% nationwide; and Miami followed closely behind with a 16.2% gap. In contrast, San Francisco remains 48.9% below prepandemic office visit levels at the low among the 11 cities analyzed —NYC, Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Houston, Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and nationwide data. The pace of NYC’s visitation growth on a year-over-year basis in 2014 was slower than Washington, D.C., which led the way at 15.2% growth, followed by Atlanta, GA and Miami, FL seeing 14.6% and 14.3% visitation growth respectively, but NYC outpaced the nationwide baseline of 10.0%. Office visitation on Fridays continues to lag, accounting for just an 11.9% share of the Monday through Friday volume. In contrast, there has been an uptick in the share of weekly visitation volume on Mondays after dropping significantly in 2022 and 2023, accounting for 18.2% in 2024 — just slightly below the 19.5% share in 2019. Mid-week visits continue to drive the city’s overall visitation volume with Tuesdays leading the way and essentially on par with pre-pandemic levels. A look at commuting trends across the East Coast also revealed that for nearby commuters, NYC share of visits has outpaced all other analyzed cities, having been on par with Washington, D.C. and slightly below Boston in 2019.

Source:    https://go.placer.ai/library/blueprint-for-recovery-lessons-from-new-yorks-office-comeback