More than half of Chicagoans are back in the office

Windy City office brokers have something to be thankful for.

A higher percentage of workers are returning to offices in Chicago than any other U.S. metro area on peak days, according to the latest data from Kastle Systems.

Chicago narrowly overtook Houston as the top metro area for peak-day office occupancy earlier this month, hitting almost 69 percent occupancy at buildings that use Kastle’s security services on the highest-occupied day of the week of June 8-14. The average occupancy for the nation’s top 10 metros on the peak day was under 60 percent.

Average occupancy throughout the week rose about half a percentage point for Chicago this month, to almost 55 percent. That’s higher than New York’s 48 percent, Los Angeles’ 50 percent and San Francisco’s 44 percent.

Chicago was also one of three metro areas to see office occupancy rise rather than decline from the week of June 7 to the week of June 14. The other two metros with rising occupancy were San Jose, rising to about 39 percent and Dallas, which also neared 55 percent.

As downtown office brokers contend with a tough market for investment sales and a record amount of sublease space on the market, return-to-office trends offer some hope.

“More and more CEOs are reflecting on their decisions and calling workers back in some form or fashion,” Jaime Fink, who leads JLL’s Chicago capital markets division, recently told The Real Deal. “We’re starting to see a more consistent trend of people coming to the realization that office space is needed for collaboration.”

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More than half of Chicagoans are back in the office

Publicly disclosed return-to-office mandates impacted more than 600,000 office workers last month, according to data from JLL that cited recent announcements establishing hybrid attendance policies for previously remote-first employees from companies including Meta, AT&T and Robinhood. More than 20,000 finance industry workers in Illinois were impacted by return-to-office mandates, per JLL.