Atlanta Office Players Say Market Has Bottomed As Availability Hits Record 33%
The Atlanta office market may have hit its nadir at the end of 2024, with a return of big lease signings giving hope that it may have finally turned a corner.

Leasing activity hit 2.4M SF in the fourth quarter, an 18% jump from Q3, according to a CBRE report released Monday, led by AIG’s 179K SF regional hub lease at Perimeter Summit. At almost 10M SF, leasing activity in 2024 was the region's highest in five years.
Still, roughly 33% of Atlanta office space is available for lease, according to CBRE, a new record after tenants emptied out more than 2M SF last year. In West Midtown, nearly half of all office space is vacant.
But with more companies pushing employees back to the office and leasing activity on the rise, experts interviewed by Bisnow believe the office market is emerging from the gloom that has been cast over it for the past few years.
“I don’t see this as an all-of-a-sudden, hockey-stick sort of recovery. We’re still going to have to slog ourselves through. But we have finally hit the bottom,” Transwestern Chief Operating Officer Bruce Ford said. “We at least can have a vision and a forecast of increased absorption over the next two to three years as more companies get employees back to the office.”
Tenants signed 50% more deals last year for offices larger than 50K SF than they did in 2023, according to Colliers. Nearly two-thirds of all leases in the fourth quarter were new leases and expansions, according to CBRE, another positive sign for the market.
The second- and third-biggest leases in the fourth quarter were Eversheds Sutherland’s 94K SF lease at Bank of America Plaza and SouthState Corp.’s lease for 87K SF at Prominence Tower in Buckhead, respectively.
Activity appears to be carrying over into 2025, with the number of companies touring office spaces outpacing the national average in Metro Atlanta, according to Avison Young’s office Busyness index.
“We expect to see more larger deals in 2025 driven by new companies entering the market as well as return-to-office mandates being implemented,” Haley Leek, a market intelligence analyst with Avison Young, told Bisnow in an email.
T. Dallas Smith & Co. principal Cedric Matheny said companies are growing more confident about their office needs as they put pressure on employees to come back to their desks five days a week.
JPMorgan Chase, Amazon, AT&T and UPS, all of which have Atlanta offices, will require employees to report to their workspaces five days a week this year.
“What we’re waiting on right now, and we’ll probably hear more at the end of this month, is the federal government,” Matheny said.
If President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his December announcement that he would require federal employees to report back to the office or fire them, it will give more momentum to the RTO movement in the corporate world, Matheny said.
“That may trigger some other companies and agencies to fall in line, which could affect the activity going forward,” he added.
Record Real Estate Partners Managing Partner Patrick Braswell said smaller companies are starting to take more office space as they require employees back more often and are less afraid that they will lose employees with RTO mandates. He said one of his clients increased its office size from 4K SF to 8K SF late last year in Nashville after implementing an RTO mandate to be able to fit all the workers under one roof.
And while the availability and vacancy rate continue to climb, the pace has stabilized, sublease listings have fallen and construction activity has sunk to the lowest level since 2011.
“I think we bottomed out six months ago,” CBRE Senior Vice President Jessica Doyle said. “But we need more big deal activity. There are a few big deals out there, but usually there’s more than a few.”
Doyle said she recently toured a company that was considering 150K SF offices in either Charlotte or Atlanta, a sign that perhaps the region is beginning to again flex its inbound activity mojo that it lost over the past couple of years. Atlanta was named the No. 3 city for headquarters relocations by Site Selection magazine this month.
Cushman & Wakefield Managing Principal Tyler Courtney said his firm is seeing an uptick in companies looking to open offices in Metro Atlanta, which could go a long way in helping tighten the office market, especially with newly delivered spaces.
According to Colliers, developers opened 2M SF of new office space last year, more than 80% of which remained without tenants by year’s end.
“[Corporate in-migration] was such an important part of the absorption story for Atlanta for so long, and it got really quiet. We’re starting to see that uptick a bit,” Courtney said. “If there’s one thing I’m watching this year, it’s that.”