Why Office Vacancies Are Shaping a Two-Speed Market

I’ve been reading quite a lot of research on the office sector lately, as well as registering what I see when walking the streets of major cities. And we’re seeing a paradox: entire floors of good office space sit vacant, while a handful of buildings remain lively, busy, and seemingly untouched by the wider slowdown.

This isn’t just an impression. Vacancy today isn’t evenly distributed. It’s becoming concentrated: fewer buildings carry the bulk of the empty space, while others continue to attract demand.

For landlords, it means that average vacancy rates don’t tell the real story anymore. You could be sitting on a building with 25% vacancy and struggling, while across the street a comparable building with the right design, technology, and market strategy is nearly full.

This reality raises some hard questions:

• What separates the buildings that still capture attention from those that don’t?

• How do you evolve your leasing strategy when averages no longer reflect your actual position?

• How do you engage occupiers when the “good enough” approach has stopped working?

In a market of concentrated vacancy, being average is not an option: you’re either in the small group of assets that occupiers gravitate toward, or you’re fighting for limited attention.

Personally, when I think back to the buildings I’ve toured recently, the ones that stood out were the ones where I could immediately understand the offer: the flexibility, the design intent, the experience of being there. That clarity is what stuck.

So while vacancy reports give us numbers, walking the city gives us perspective. And the conclusion is clear: landlords can’t rely on averages anymore. They need to evolve how they lease - with sharper tools, better data, and more compelling ways to engage - and that will determine which side of the story they will be on.