The return-to-office movement has stabilized, with little movement in occupancy rate so far in 2025. But a new study shows just how stark the divergence in foot traffic has become between trophy office towers and everything else.
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Class-A-plus offices in Manhattan were visited at 81% of 2019 levels in February, compared to a visitation rate of 63% for Class-A and A-minus buildings and 66% for Class-B and C offices, according to cellphone tracking data provided to Bisnow by the Real Estate Board of New York and Placer.ai.
The data covers 350 buildings with a combined square footage of 225M SF, or roughly 50% of Manhattan's office stock. It shows that in February, the city's office visitation rate averaged 67.3%, virtually unchanged from a year earlier.
Tracking foot traffic and occupancy against 2019 benchmarks shows that the gap between prepandemic office usage and today's behavior has changed only marginally since 2023.
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REBNY and Placer.ai have come up with new metrics that show how the underlying dynamics of the market have changed. Chief among those is visitation share, or the percentage of the cellphone visits of seven minutes or longer captured by certain segments of the market.
In 2019, Class-A-plus offices had a visitation share of 39%. So far in 2025, top-tier offices have captured 42% of visits. By comparison, the visitation share for the next tier of properties, Class-A and A-minus, saw their share of visits drop from 43% to 41% between 2019 and 2025.
While small, the changes are an important indicator about where the city’s office market is going, REBNY Vice President of Research Keith DeCoster said.
“Even though it may seem like a small percentage increase, we're talking about millions of device visits,” he said. “It definitely suggests that the market is stabilizing to some extent.”
REBNY’s data also showed that the tried-and-tested maxim of “location, location, location” is still holding true when it comes to office visitations. Midtown now captures 66% of all office visits, compared to 64% in 2019.
Midtown South held steady at a 10% visitation share in 2019 and 2025, and Downtown Manhattan's visitation share this year is 23%, down from 25% in the year before the pandemic.
The visitation shares align with leasing patterns. Trophy space has been increasingly sought-after in recent years, with the number of leases signed for $100 and $200 per SF setting records in 2023 and 2024.
“The financial sector has been the trailblazer. Legal as well,” DeCoster said. “But other sectors are coming back to the office as well.”
Amazon has most famously pushed its employees back to their desks full time this year, and it has taken nearly 600K SF across three buildings since October to accommodate the additional workers.
Leasing has continued on an upward trajectory: Landlords signed 12.2M SF of deals in Q1, bringing the city’s office vacancy rate down from 20.1% to 17.7%, according to Savills. Many of the leases signed in the first quarter were expansions.
It was the most active quarter for leasing since 2019, and the supply was further tightened by nearly 1M SF coming off the market because the buildings are planned to be converted into housing, according to Colliers.
“As supply decreases by way of elevated leasing activity and conversions, and demand rising as companies strengthen office utilization, as the REBNY report suggests, we can see a definitively more favorable environment for owners,” Avison Young Head of NYC Investment Sales Brandon Polakoff said in a statement.
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