The pandemic will have an impact on the office market – but how? Discussions often focus on the topic of home offices and the change of workplace concepts. But other factors weigh heavier.

Opinions differ widely on how the Covid 19 pandemic will affect the office market. Mostly, however, it is about the establishment of home offices or mobile working and the accompanying change in workplace concepts. The conclusions range from a swan song for the office to calls for more decentralised office space close to home. Our autumn forecast has therefore focused on the elementary connection between overall economic development and the state of the office market.

The German economy presents an ambivalent picture: The very robust economic recovery in the third quarter of 2020 was followed by the second wave of infection and the associated lockdown, the impact of which is still completely open at the beginning of 2021. These uncertainties have been largely incorporated into the office market forecast via assumptions (modelling of the pandemic). Their effects will be felt sector-specifically, but a decline in office employment is not currently assumed.

Despite the overall economic downturn and initially a small sideways movement, the number of office employees will rise again from the middle of 2021, as the chart for January shows. However, the expected growth for the next five years of around 1 % p.a. is significantly below the values achieved in the past five years. Here, the average was 2.4 %. There were already increasing signs in 2019 that this development was losing momentum. The slowdown is therefore not solely due to the Covid 19 pandemic.

Contact person: Sven Carstensen, board of directors at bulwiengesa,
carstensen@bulwiengesa.de