A report from the real estate service firm NGKF released late last year provides new numbers on an ongoing phenomenon: the slow, agonizing death of the American office park. The report looks at five far-flung office tenancy submarkets—Santa Clara, in the San Francisco Bay Area; Denver; the O’Hare region in Chicago; Reston/Herndon outside of Washington, D.C.; and Parsippany, New Jersey—and finds a general aura of decline.
Between 14 and 22 percent of the suburban office inventory in these areas is “in some stage of obsolescence,” suggesting that between 600 million and 1 billion square feet of office space are far from ideal for the modern company and worker. That’s about 7.5 percent of the country’s entire office inventory.
