NYC gets small post-Labor Day office bump as California, Texas slide back

New York City was looking for a big return-to-office bump after Labor Day. It got a small one, while office attendance actually dropped in California and Texas cities.

Office occupancy in New York climbed 4.3 percentage points after the holiday to 42.5 percent, according to card-swipe data from Kastle Systems. (The company’s data does not include some large office portfolios in the city.)

This year’s end-of-summer increase, however, leaves the occupancy number well below the 49 percent of workers who returned to the office in the week after Labor Day last year. This is despite the fact that some prognosticators believed this would be the year people returned to their workspaces, as companies like BlackRock, Meta, Robinhood and  Zoom have called employees back.

Dallas, Austin and Houston all saw declines in occupancy from the Wednesday before Labor Day to the one after. Dallas had the biggest drop — 2.1 percentage points — to end up at about 52 percent.

Austin slipped to nearly 58 percent and Houston was just shy of 60 percent. Texas has led the country in return to office so far this year, so it had more gains to give back. Still, that is not what office landlords had in mind as they struggle to keep their properties’ valuations up.

In California, San Francisco saw post-Labor Day occupancy drop 1.5 percentage points to 40 percent, and Los Angeles slid 1.2 points to just under 48 percent.

Chicago’s metro office market saw occupancy decrease 0.7 points to 50.6 percent.

Across the 10 cities that Kastle tracks, the average occupancy last week was 40 percent.

It’s become an annual event for pro-office groups to look toward the beginning of fall for signs of an attendance comeback, though some major stakeholders are acknowledging that the return to work is not playing out as they had hoped.

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