Ten Percent of Office Buildings Are Carrying 60% of the Vacancy
JLL just published its Q1 2026 U.S. Office Market Dynamics report. One number buried on page six tells you more about the state of office than everything else in the document combined.
10% of office buildings comprise more than 60% of the total national vacancy.
The market isn't 22% empty. A small, specific set of buildings is dragging the entire aggregate down.
Everyone is still reading the headline vacancy number like it describes one market. It doesn't. It describes two.
What's Happening
The Q1 report has a lot of good news in it if you know where to look. Net absorption was positive for the third consecutive quarter, up 3.5 million square feet. Leasing activity grew 7.6% versus Q1 2025 and is up 3.7% over the past year. Twenty-five of JLL's 52 tracked markets are now at 90% or more of their pre-pandemic leasing peaks. Technology leasing is up 35% YoY. Finance, Professional Services, and Aerospace & Defense are all exceeding pre-pandemic levels.
At the top of the market, the story is even sharper. Q1 saw more than 4 million square feet leased at starting rents above $100 per square foot, the highest Q1 volume JLL has ever recorded. Same-asset rents are up 0.8% in the past year, led by Miami/South FL (+4%), Orlando (+3%), and New York (+2.2%).
So the good buildings are full, leasing up, charging more, and setting records.
Now read the rest of the report. Office-using employment declined across every sector in the past year. Professional Services -0.2%, Finance -0.7%, Government -1%, Information -2.7%. The S&P is down roughly 5% since January. NASDAQ, 10%. JLL's own framing on the Economy page: "Recessionary conditions for office-using industries threaten leasing recovery."
The market is recovering and tightening at the same time. Both things are true. That's not a contradiction. That's bifurcation reaching its logical end.
Why It Matters
We've been watching this story play out inside our portfolio. Across HqO buildings, resource bookings were up roughly 35% year over year the week of April 12. Event bookings are up more than 50% over the past eight weeks. Service requests more than doubled.
Those aren't desk reservations. Those are tenants using buildings, hosting, gathering, and operating. In the buildings where tenants already wanted to be.
Propmodo confirmed the same pattern from a different angle. Average peak utilization across the market is just 25%. But at A+ buildings on Tuesdays, occupancy hits above 95%. In the same data set. The top-tier buildings are effectively full on the days that matter. The bottom half is at a quarter of capacity and falling further.
Here's the kicker. Propmodo also found that 44% of office space across the market is still configured as "me" space (individual workstations and private offices). Only 16% is built for collaboration. Every signal we have about how the office is actually being used in 2026 points toward collaboration, events, and gathering. And nearly half of the space in the market is built for the opposite job.
That's why the 10%-holds-60% stat lands so hard. It's not just that those buildings are old. It's that they're built wrong.
What To Do About It
Stop reading the aggregate vacancy number. It's not your number. The national headline says 22.2%. Your number is whatever your building is running at on a Tuesday, compared to the A+ building down the street, configured for what tenants actually want now.
If you're in the top decile of the market (modern layout, actual collaboration space, a real experience story), the fundamentals are moving in your direction. Rents are growing. Leasing is back to pre-pandemic norms. Tenants are using the buildings, not just leasing them. Your job is to protect that position and keep measuring.
If you're in the 10% carrying 60% of the vacancy, the JLL report is telling you what comes next. Inventory removals have quietly erased 25 million square feet of supply from the peak in late 2023. That's the market doing its own cleanup. Conversions, teardowns, repositions. Buildings that can't compete on experience are getting re-categorized out of the office market entirely.
Leesman's been measuring workplace experience across 1M+ workplace responses for over a decade. The buildings with the highest scores aren't the ones with the longest amenity list. They're the ones whose layout, programming, and operational rhythm match how tenants actually work in 2026: collaborative, intermittent, event-heavy. The buildings in the bottom decile aren't losing to remote work. They're losing to the good buildings.
Two markets. Same zip code. Don't let the aggregate tell you where you stand.
The bifurcation isn't coming. Ten percent of it is eating the other sixty.
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