U.S. occupiers leased 127.3 million square feet in the first half of 2026. Strongest first half since 2019, 13% ahead of last year, and the second quarter alone ran about 9% above the average quarterly pace of 2017 through 2019.
Propmodo’s Travis Barrington walked through the new Savills report on Wednesday, and the headline writes itself. The recovery isn’t coming. It came.
Then he buries the actual story in his last line: “The leasing recovery is real, but it is being distributed by building, not by market.”
Read that twice. Not by market. By building.
WHAT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING
The supply side finally turned. Availability dropped to 22.7% from 24.5% a year ago, and it fell in about 82% of tracked markets. Sublease space, the thing everybody said would hang over this sector for a decade, is down 40% from its 2023 peak. New deliveries this year are running at roughly a quarter of the pre-pandemic peak. Nobody built anything for four years and now there’s a shortage of the good stuff.
You can see it in the split. Trophy Class A availability in gateway markets is at 17.2%. Non-trophy Class A is at 24.8%. Same city, same class, seven and a half points apart. Class A demand is up 35% since mid-2024. San Francisco, the market everyone wrote the obituary for, now leads major metros in leasing relative to inventory, and building visits there are up 40% year over year.
Here’s the part I keep chewing on. Savills says occupiers are now evaluating “individual buildings and micro-locations rather than broad submarkets alone,” and that in nearly every metro the rent spread between the priciest and cheapest submarket widened faster than the averages would suggest. Walkability, transit, amenities, and how close you are to your clients are now line items in the price. A few blocks decides whether an asset is well leased or in special servicing.
So the market number is a nice headline that describes nobody’s building.
WHY IT MATTERS
If buildings are being picked one at a time, the question stops being “how’s the market” and becomes “what does my building do that the one across the street doesn’t.”
Here’s my favorite data point of the year on that. Across our portfolio, exactly one building out of the 145 with booking activity in the last three months installed nap pods. Over that window, that one building’s pods got booked more often than gym equipment, game rooms, and event spaces across the entire rest of the portfolio combined. Not more than any one of them. More than all of them together. And nap demand peaks Wednesday, then falls more than 40% by Friday, which is exactly the shape of a workweek that’s front-loaded into three days.
One landlord looked at their tenants and concluded that people are tired. Everyone else bought a golf simulator.
Leesman’s data says that landlord read it right. Taking a break now registers as important to about half of employees, higher than it was pre-pandemic. And roughly half of people stay parked in one setting for their entire day in the office, which is a polite way of saying most buildings give them nowhere else to go. Meanwhile everybody at home has a couch.
WHAT TO DO
Rank your amenities by bookings, not by budget. Pull the list, sort by actual use, and look at what’s at the bottom. Somebody sold you that. Somebody photographed it for the leasing deck. Almost nobody uses it.
Watch midweek specifically. Tuesday through Thursday is where the demand is concentrated, and it’s where your building either performs or doesn’t. Friday programming is a rounding error.
And take Savills’ finding as an operating instruction, not a market observation. If occupiers are underwriting individual buildings, then your comp set isn’t your submarket. It’s the four addresses your prospects are also touring. Know what those four do better than you, specifically, this quarter.
The office market beat 2019. Great. That number belongs to the sector, not to you. Availability is falling in 82% of markets, which means it’s rising in the rest, and inside the winning markets there are buildings quietly losing tenants to an address six blocks away with better light and a room where someone can shut their eyes for twenty minutes.
The market recovered. That’s not the same as your building recovering.
Nobody leases a market.
