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Occupancy Remains Just Under 50%
Office occupancy rose three tenths of a point this past week to 49.5%, according to Kastle’s 10-city Back to Work Barometer. Changes in occupancy were minor across all cities, with seven of the ten cities increasing, and no city moving a full point up or down. The daily high was Tuesday at 58.5% occupancy, and the low was Friday at 32.4%.
Nearly all cities are within a point of their record high pandemic occupancy. However, occupancy in Austin, Texas is down more than eight points from its March 1 pandemic high. The city has experienced extreme highs and lows in occupancy since the beginning of the year, due to several city-wide work interruptions from storms and other events.
Methodology
To provide some clarity on the issues facing American businesses, Kastle has been studying keycard, fob and KastlePresence app access data from the 2,600 buildings and 41,000 businesses we secure across 47 states. We’re analyzing the anonymized data to identify trends in how Americans are returning to the office.
Kastle’s reach of buildings, businesses and cardholders secured generates millions of access events daily as users enter office complexes, and individual company workspaces. The Barometer weekly report summarizes access control data among our business partners in ten major metro areas, not a national statistical sample. Charted percentages reflect unique authorized user entries in each market relative to a pre-COVID baseline, averaged weekly.*
*On March 22, 2021, Kastle moved from daily to weekly data reporting to provide a more robust and comprehensive picture of office occupancy. We have also recalculated data back to the start of the time series for consistency. This has only a marginal impact on most cities and the national average.
Click here for more information about the Barometer methodology and FAQ
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