Wildfire smoke drifting across the U.S. last month pushed air‑quality readings into unhealthy territory for New York City and other densely populated areas, resurfacing conversations about how landlords manage the health of the air circulating their office buildings.

The quality of the air inside a building can fade into the background of the work experience, but it can have a profound impact on the quality of an office tower. Air quality is declining across the country, in part because of wildfires in Canada, and proactive property owners are actively managing their air, enabling them to continue business as usual.

“We messaged out to our tenants, I think preemptively, to tell them these are the filters we have in place and what that meant in terms of providing, I'll call it, frankly, a healthier indoor environment than what the outside offered,” Sydney Mainster, vice president of sustainability at The Durst Organization, said of the company's response to July's wave of smoke.

Air quality is an important but overlooked aspect of the office space — one that tenants don’t notice until it takes a turn for the worse. But it has real, science-backed cognitive benefits and, with air quality declining across the country and massive fires likely to become more common, proactive property owners are managing not only their air but also their messaging around how they care for their spaces. 

Across all six days in July where Canadian wildfire smoke was most abundant across the U.S., 21 of the 25 hardest-hit metro areas had air particulate levels that the Environmental Protection Agency would describe as “unhealthy for sensitive groups.”  

While orange skies draw attention to the problem, it is far from gone when the skies are clearer. Western U.S. wildfire smoke has drifted across the country this month to leave most of the mid-Atlantic facing moderate levels of particulate exposure that could impact sensitive people. 

“Wildfires got people's attention when the skies over New York turned orange a few years ago, and then this summer when again the air pollution was so thick you could taste it. But I also want people to know that even on the East Coast today, we see the impacts of wildfire smoke,” said Joe Allen, a professor and director of the Healthy Buildings Program at Harvard University. 

Landlords frequently debate the value of more visible amenities like an in-building gym used by a small group of tenants, but there is evidence-backed science that air quality leads to better business outcomes, Allen said.

“People who are in buildings with better indoor air quality perform better on these objective tests of cognitive function in domains that are important for business: How well do you seek out and utilize information? How strategic are you in your decision-making? How well do you respond to crises, big and small?’” he said. 

Allen and his team published the Global CogFx study, which found a measurable improvement in cognitive performance as air quality improved, both in lablike settings and in actual offices in the U.S., UK, China, India, Mexico and Thailand.  

Response times got measurably slower for every step-up in carbon dioxide in an environment, used as a stand-in for ventilation, and response times slowed by nearly 1% as a result of increased particulate exposure. In effect, bad air quality is costing business owners money, he said.

“We talk about not just the health benefits, but the business benefits,” Allen said. “We estimate bottom-line gains to the business of up to 10% simply from improving indoor air quality.”

Fresher air is more important than better amenities to 61% of workers, according to a study by Pollfish for GPS Air, a filtration company. A full two-thirds of employees feel reassured that their workplace is being actively managed when ventilation, airflow or temperature are improved. Noticeable issues like odors and dust influence 83% of workers’ confidence in management. 

The solutions, which focus on improving ventilation, maximizing air circulation with filtration in place, and monitoring interior air quality, aren’t limited to new construction and are instead relatively inexpensive. 

“This is achievable in every building that's out there. It's not just the shiny new buildings,” Allen said.

It starts with measuring air quality — what gets measured gets addressed, Allen said — and some large landlords and property managers have deployed entire networks of sensors to monitor the air and make adjustments to ventilation and other air conditioning to be at optimal quality. 

Durst, which owns 16M SF of office space, has deployed sensors across much of its New York office footprint to track air quality in real time, not only for a whole building but also for specific rooms, and can make nuanced adjustments accordingly. 

“It's part and parcel to our day-to-day operations,” said Phil Skalaski, senior vice president of engineering and energy services at The Durst Organization.

The landlord tracks seven air-quality metrics including carbon dioxide, particulate matter and formaldehyde inside its properties and adjusts its HVAC systems, typically as simply as by changing one of the system’s filters or adjusting the amount of air circulating from outside, to eliminate issues.

When smoke blew from Canada across the United States and into New York City in July, it was just another day of operations for the facilities management teams that are constantly monitoring their extensive air filtration systems, Skalaski said. 

Indoor environmental quality has been a pillar of Durst’s business strategy since 2013, so it already had systems in place in March 2020 when the pandemic created a sudden demand for clean air systems in workplaces. By 2023, when fires in Canada first sent a thick haze across New York City, Durst was not only prepared but ready to proactively message. 

The landlord put out an explainer to tenants outlining the work it had already done to ensure its properties were well positioned to handle any increase in pollution. The company did something similar during July’s smoke incident. 

There is a split in the commercial real estate world between those with a focus on air quality and those without, Allen said. He has worked with top firms including Durst, Google and JPMorgan Chase on strategies around maximizing quality airflow.

But he said there were just as many landlords who have put their heads in the sand by not monitoring indoor air quality — one of the nine foundations of a healthy building identified by Allen’s group, which has existed since before the pandemic reminded tenants about the importance of the air they were breathing. 

Most of the firms that are doing the work to ensure a healthy work environment that includes a strategy around airflow don’t do enough to message that to tenants, said Wendy Feldman Block, an executive managing director at Savills in Washington, D.C. 

Tenants frequently care about how air systems are being managed but don’t know the right questions to ask, while landlords that are doing the work don’t communicate it down to leasing teams to make the pitch, Feldman Block said. She has a two-page survey for landlords when handling a request for proposals that focuses on air quality to help bring it into the conversation for tenants.

“Landlords have not done a good job of telling people about it. And it starts with their leasing agents for the building, because those are the front lines,” she said. 

Air-quality monitoring is also part of JLL’s facilities management rubric, with monitors inside its properties benchmarked against readings about outdoor air quality, said Justin Kenyon, the managing director of the technology division at JLL, which works with roughly 1,100 technology sector clients leasing a total of 275M SF globally.

When Canadian fires send smoke southward, JLL’s active management approach means it is already positioned to mitigate any impacts with commonsense strategies. 

“The building protocols apply for a wildfire, but you know there could be an industrial event happening nearby that would trigger the same kinds of protocols, which are things like reducing or eliminating the outside air intake in a facility and being prepared with filter changes for the HVAC systems,” Kenyon said. 

For the landlords JLL serves, the cost is minimal.

“If I'm having a budget conversation with the client, we generally aren't talking about how often we're changing the filters,” Kenyon added.