Comcast Puts 500K SF Of Office Back On Market As Sublease Surges

Comcast has more than 500K SF of office on the market for sublease nationwide, representing about a tenth of all the office space the media giant occupies in the United States.

The company told CoStar that it is using office space differently now — that is, workers are coming to their offices less often than before, a widespread trend.

A significant return to the office nationwide was anticipated for this fall but hasn't materialized in the way the CRE industry hoped.

“Most organizations have not answered that fundamental question: ‘Why is working from the office better than working from home?’” Gartner Vice President Brian Kropp told Bisnow earlier this month.

For its part, Comcast said its office workers need to be in the office three days a week, an increasingly common pattern.

Comcast is hardly alone in putting space on the sublease market. There are a record 217.8M SF of offices for sublease nationwide, according to a report by Colliers.

That is considerably more than the last peak of 143.3M SF in the second quarter of 2009, when the Global Financial Crisis was in full swing. 

This time around, the surfeit of sublease space is driven by companies re-evaluating their real estate needs in light of the fact that the five-day-in-office workweek is a dead letter for many office workers.

For anyone actually looking for office space, however, the influx of sublease space means that good deals are available.

Colliers analyzed the discounts available for Class-A sublease space in the top 10 U.S. office markets and found that the average discount is now more than 30%, up from just over 26% at the beginning of the year.