Boston's Sluggish Affordable Housing Development Pace Leading To Mounting Frustration

The Bay State’s booming life sciences market grew by 5M SF last year and has more than doubled in the past decade, according to a Massachusetts Biotechnology Council report released Wednesday. There is now more than 40M SF of dedicated life sciences space in Massachusetts, a…

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Future demand for offices is one of the biggest questions for commercial real estate and for society at large. It is also clearly vexing property investors.

Office deals made up just 27% of global transaction volumes in the first half of 2021, data from Real Capital Analytics showed, down from 33% in 2020 and 36% in 2019. The slowdown is part of a wider long-term trend: From 2007-2009, in the wake of the financial crisis, offices accounted for 46% of all global real estate transactions. But the fall from 2019 to mid-2021 represents an unprecedented drop of nine percentage points in just 18 months. Clearly, investors are wary of investing in an asset class whose future seems so unclear.

Yet the wariness is not homogenous. In Asia, the decline of offices is not as acute — globally, industrial is now the biggest real estate asset class in terms of deal volume, but that is not the case in Asia. 

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CHICAGO — The fear that kept downtown office markets shut down at the start of the coronavirus pandemic is starting to lift.

The spread of vaccinations has been the most important factor in getting life somewhat back to normal, but other factors will also play roles in kicking off a return to the office this fall, including how to get there.

Mass transit systems had been one of the biggest early worries for public health experts. Packing commuters into buses and trains for long trips into the Central Business District seemed like the perfect recipe for new Covid-19 outbreaks, and riders quickly disappeared.

“Ninety-seven and a half percent of our ridership left within a five-day period,” Metra CEO Jim Derwinski said last week during an in-person meeting on public transportation and safety held by BOMA/Chicago.

But experts say much more is now known about how the disease spreads, and as downtown companies put plans in place that will bring back at least a portion of their workforces, they need to get the word out that hopping on buses and trains is safe.

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