Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, technology companies have been among the first to institute work-from-home orders and among the most vocal about switching to remote work permanently. At the same time, many of them have been expanding their office footprints at a much faster rate than other types of corporate occupiers. In a continuation of that trend, tech companies accounted for 22 percent of all U.S. office leasing during the second and third quarters of 2021, reveals the most recent Tech-30 report from commercial real estate services firm CBRE, which looks at U.S. and Canadian markets. The figure marks an increase from the 17 percent of all office leasing that tech companies accounted for in 2020. What’s more, their office leasing activity rose by an average of 122 percent in the second and third quarters of this year compared to the first.
Of course, certain markets have benefitted much more from tech companies expanding their office holdings than others, leasing to greater positive net absorption and, in some cases, double-digit growth in office rents over the course of the past two years. CBRE broke down where office rents have increased the most from the second quarter of 2019 through the second quarter of 2021 and how those figures correlated to the markets’ tech job growth.
