I’ll give CBRE credit, their 2025 Americas Occupier Sentiment Survey has its finger firmly on the pulse of real estate leaders. Regardless of the tough time I give this report below, I think everyone should read it with a critical eye because it is a very effective summary of where a large part (if not a majority) of CRE professionals believe the industry is today. Understanding the state of mind of your clients, partners, and potential vendors is an important aspect of building healthy relationships. It also helps to ensure alignment in communication if you are coming at a subject from differing starting points.
However, reading this report, its main discussion is to simply summarize the results that their very targeted group of leaders gave them in their survey results. There is almost no examination of whether there may be flaws with those results, misleading answers, or the need for deeper expertise to explain what those results mean. It takes the data provided by these leaders as accurate without bringing in any outside, independent data to validate or contradict the results of their survey.
And the results are unsurprising if you are part of the LinkedIn CRE community in any way. Supposedly, there were “incremental attendance gains” even though data on that point seems to show attendance has largely been stable for over a year now. This is their first point under Key Findings.
Their third point under Key Findings is that “inconsistent attendance challenges culture.” They say that 73% of companies see full occupancy on peak days “but only 34% report average attendance is at capacity.” No one at CBRE thought it strange to point out that unless you have the same attendance every single day, average attendance is definitionally less than peak attendance. To me, this reads as either their respondents didn’t quite understand the question or have returned answers in conflict with reality.
The fourth Key Finding is about Assigned Seating becoming less popular. This one is…a snapshot of the whole report. Of course, Assigned Seating is becoming less popular. That statement has been true every year since 2021. This statement is the reason that the national office vacancy rate continues to go up. This is the fundamental truth driving change in corporate and commercial real estate today. When employees are not in the office every day, the only way to efficiently reduce your space is to move away from assigned seats.
And then we get to the fifth Key Finding. This is the one that makes my head spin after all of the points that came above. “A growing majority of occupiers (67%) expect to maintain or expand their space over the next three years…” I mean…it really takes some strength of belief to go through attendance challenges and assigned seating being less popular and end with a statement that says that we are about to start going up again.
Again, none of this is meant as a knock on CBRE specifically. This report could have been authored by any of the national and global CRE service providers. They all want these key findings to be true because it means the trends of the past few years will finally be reversing. Many corporate real estate leaders want these results to be true because it means their change efforts will not be as difficult as they currently appear.