Office Leasing Just Hit a Decade High. The Buildings Getting Leased Aren’t Built for the Demand

CBRE's Q1 report adds the price layer. Average asking rent up 2.2% year over year. The fastest rent growth in six years.

So the "office is dead" narrative is officially over. Demand is back. Rent is climbing. Tenants are signing.

Now pull the data on what's actually happening inside those buildings and you get a completely different read. The job tenants want a building to do has changed. And most buildings don't do that job.

What's Happening

We track resource bookings across our portfolio every day. Compare the last 60 days to the 60 days before that, same buildings, same tenants. Here's the mix shift.

Bookings for conference hubs (flexible huddle space) up 34%. Private offices up 22%. Individual desks up 25%. Sleep pods up 12%. Once spring hit, outdoor space and roof deck bookings each more than 4x'd.

Now the other column. Large conference rooms down 7%. Small conference rooms down 10%. Lounges down 15%. Event space down 27%. Classrooms down 36%. Auditoriums down 13%.

Door unlocks across the portfolio up roughly 13% in the last 30 days. Buildings are busier. But the rooms that are getting used are different.

This is a tenant base voting with their feet. They aren't booking the boardroom. They aren't gathering in lounges. They aren't hosting in auditoriums. They're working at desks, meeting in flex hubs, and recovering in pods.

Why It Matters

This is the gap between leasing momentum and operational fitness, and it's going to get expensive for half the market.

Lease the space. Sign the rent bump. Then realize that 40% of your inventory is configured for a usage pattern that's gone. That's not a bug in the data. That's the next 24 months of CRE.

Leesman's been measuring this from the experience side for over a decade. Across 1M+ workplace responses, the buildings with the highest scores aren't the ones with the longest amenity list. They're the ones whose layout matches how teams actually work right now. Smaller meetings. More flex. More individual work surface inside the office, not less.

The aggregate vacancy number says 20% of the office market is empty. The number that actually matters is how much of the LEASED space is functionally inert. Empty conference rooms inside a leased building are a slower-burning version of the same problem.

What To Do

Three moves.

First, audit your bookable inventory against your actual booking data. If 60% of your reservable space is large and small conference rooms and they're trending down, you're holding inventory the market doesn't want. Convert. Subdivide. Reprogram.

Second, stop measuring leasing success at signing. Measure it 90 days post-move-in. The tenant that signed a five-year deal and then never books the boardroom is your churn risk in 2028. You won't see them coming if you're only watching occupancy.

Third, get out of the amenity arms race and into the configuration arms race. The yoga room and the cold brew tap aren't the issue. The issue is whether your floor plate, your meeting room mix, and your individual work surfaces match the booking patterns of an AI-augmented hybrid workforce. None of that is on a glossy brochure.

The office leasing market is the strongest it's been in a decade. CBRE's rent data is the strongest in six years. The headlines are right.

But the demand has a shape now. Buildings that fit the shape are filling up at $100+ per square foot. Buildings that don't are signing leases for space tenants barely use, and those tenants come up for renewal in three to five years.

Anyways. The market is back. Half of it isn't ready.