The Office Market Had It Hard in 2023. Next Year Looks Worse.

Office building owners, hammered by falling demand and high interest rates, struggled in 2023. But they mostly managed to stay afloat.

That is going to be a lot harder to do next year.

Many landlords have been able to extend their loans, often by putting in more capital. But a lot of those extensions are now expiring, and owners are losing hope that occupancy rates will rebound soon.

That means many more office landlords will be compelled to pay off their mortgages, sell their properties at a steep discount or hand their buildings over to their creditors.

“In 2024, it’s game time,” said Scott Rechler, chief executive of RXR Realty, a major owner of office buildings in the New York region. “Owners and lenders are going to have to come to terms as to where values are, where debt needs to be and right-sizing capital structures for these buildings to be successful.”

Office demand shows no sign of returning to pre pandemic levels. While the number of full-time remote employees has dwindled, hybrid workplace policies look here to stay. In the fourth quarter, 62% of U.S. businesses allowed employees to work from home some days of the week, up from 51% in the first quarter, according to Scoop Technologies.

Return-to-office rates also stalled for most of 2023. Kastle Systems, which tracks security-card swipes in 10 major U.S. cities, said that average office attendance is about half of its pre pandemic level. Placer.ai, which tracks mobile phone data, puts it in the 60% to 65% range. But it also said the return rate has topped out.

The office market has shown “some monthly fluctuations but little real change in the overall trajectory,” Placer.ai said in a November report.

The U.S. office vacancy rate stands at a record 13.6%, up from 9.4% at the end of 2019, according to data firm CoStar Group. The firm is forecasting it will rise to 15.7% by the end of 2024 and will peak above 17% by the end of 2026.

That vacancy rate is poised to push higher because nearly half of office leases signed before the pandemic haven’t expired, CoStar said. When they do, many of the businesses will likely take less space than they are currently occupying, whether they are renewing or relocating.

Take the case of Chicago law firm Neal Gerber Eisenberg, which signed one of the city’s largest 2023 office leases earlier this fall. The firm, which has grown steadily throughout the pandemic, adopted a policy that requires employees to work from the office at least eight days a month. Neal Gerber leased 90,000 square feet at its new location, down from the 113,000 square feet it will be giving up.

Beyond the longer-term decline in demand, office landlords are still contending with high interest rates. Landlords that have to refinance debt borrowed when rates were at historic lows will face much higher borrowing costs as high vacancy is putting rents and incomes under pressure.

In recent weeks, inflation has been declining and the Federal Reserve is likely to ease interest rates in 2024. That will soften the blow. But landlords still face a financial squeeze, analysts say.

“If you have a mortgage that’s expiring at 3% or 4%, there’s no way you’re refinancing at 3% or 4%,” said Steve Sakwa, an analyst with Evercore ISI. Even though rates have come down, he added, property owners are still looking at rates that could be double their expiring rates to refinance.

Not all the signals are bleak for the office market in 2024. Demand is still strong for the highest quality and best-located space in many markets from tenants willing to pay high rents to encourage employees to return to offices.

Developers have retreated from new construction in the sector, so there’s little competition from new supply. The 30 million square feet in office construction starts in 2023 was the lowest amount since 2010, according to CoStar.

Cities such as San Francisco, New York and Boston are lowering costs and streamlining the process for converting obsolete office buildings into apartments. While this isn’t expected to result in a big decline in vacancy, the actions might bring more activity to business districts, giving a psychological boost to downtown landlords and businesses.

But the steadily rising number of owners who are defaulting on their mortgages because of falling rent rolls looms over the market. The delinquency rate of bank loans and loans converted into commercial mortgage-backed securities currently is over 6% compared with below 1% before the pandemic hit, according to data firm Trepp.

High delinquencies combined with the dismal office outlook already have convinced some owners to hand properties back to lenders or sell for sharply discounted prices.

In Stamford, Conn., the owner of One Stamford Forum, a 500,000-square-foot building whose tenants include troubled Purdue Pharma, this fall gave the building back to its creditors, according to Trepp. In San Francisco, buyers have purchased office buildings like 60 Spear Street and 350 California Street for fractions of what they were worth before the pandemic.

Trepp is projecting that the office delinquency rate could be over 8% by the second half of next year. As more landlords default, the new owners that replace them—buying in at greatly reduced prices—will likely put more pressure on the market because they’ll be able to charge lower rents and still make a profit.

“What could be catastrophic is if you start seeing corporate profit pressures leading to continued or accelerated pace of office downsizing,” said Stephen Buschbom, Trepp’s research director.

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

The Office Market Had It Hard in 2023. Next Year Looks Worse.

Office building owners are losing hope that occupancy rates will rebound soon

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.