Empty Offices Risk Wiping Out $250 Billion in Commercial Property Value
US office vacancy rate is forecast to hit a peak of 24% by 2026.
An empty office space in a building in San Francisco, California.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergNearly one-quarter of all US office space will be vacant by 2026 as working from home persists, slicing commercial-property values by as much as $250 billion, according to a report from Moody’s.
Office-vacancy rates are expected to rise to 24% from 19.8% in the first quarter of this year in the US, reducing revenue for office landlords by between $8 billion and $10 billion when combined with the impact of lower rents and lease turnovers, the authors of the report said. That, in turn, could translate into “property value destruction” in the range of a quarter-trillion dollars, Todd Metcalfe, Moody’s associate director of commercial real estate (CRE) forecasting, and Tom LaSalvia, Moody’s head of CRE economics, said in a separate analysis that’s not contained in the report.