As Tampa developers prepare to deliver 1M square feet of office space, new JLL report says workers are banking on hybrid arrangements post-pandemic
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Dec 7, 2020

Office workers' newfound preference for hybrid work arrangements — spending part of their time working from home and the remaining part of the day in an office or other workspace — could have a meaningful effect on the 1 million square feet of new office space Tampa Bay developers will deliver in 2021.

About 72 percent of employees want to continue working from home after the novel coronavirus pandemic has passed, and a majority of them want to do so an average of two days a week, according to a November report from JLL, a commercial real estate firm. The number of days worked remotely is expected to double post-pandemic, going from 1.2 days to 2.4 days a week, according to JLL's online survey of 2,033 office workers across 10 countries spanning major industries.

No one — from office market experts to respondents to JLL's survey — expects the need for office space to disappear. But hybrid work arrangements mean decision makers will re-evaluate how much space they need and likely downsize if their full staff rarely reports to the office at the same time.

Beyond reducing their footprints, landlords who were previously drawn to locations in the urban core may reconsider suburban office space as more of their employees relocate to farther-flung locales for more space. A recent report from Cushman & Wakefield Inc. discusses the increasing interest in small, suburban offices in the wake of the pandemic.

Those two dynamics could mean challenges are ahead for the new office space under construction in and around Tampa's urban core. Between Water Street Tampa, Midtown Tampa and The Heights, nearly 1 million square feet is set to be delivered next year. Within those developments, 750,000 square feet had yet to be leased as of October. (The Heights office space, Heights Union, landed a 75,000-square-foot lease with AxoGen prior to beginning construction; the office tower under construction in Midtown Tampa has signed a 10,000-square-foot deal and sold one of its signage opportunities to South State Bank.)

Prior to the pandemic, Tampa faced a shortage of big blocks of contiguous office space, and a new multi-tenant office building hadn't been built in the downtown area for a quarter century. But sublease vacancy rates in Tampa Bay hit historic highs this year after the pandemic forced most office-based work to transition to a remote model — just as a large chunk of space is about to be added to the market. That amount of availability could shift the market in tenants' favor for the first time in years.

Other findings of the JLL survey:

24 percent of employees want to work exclusively in the office and 50 percent prefer a hybrid approach — which means that nearly three-quarters want the ability to come into an office

Work-life balance (72 percent) has overtaken securing a comfortable salary (69 percent), and a conscious, local and healthy lifestyle has become as important as finding a sense of purpose in work for 60 percent of respondents

71 percent of respondents expect more flexible schedules post pandemic, 57 percent want to have a wider choice of workspaces in the office and 43 percent would like to be able to work from a co-working facility from time to time

75 percent of survey respondents expect their employer to support their work at home, and 33 percent are asking for a work-at-home allowance

Almost half of the survey respondents want both a connection to the outdoors (“green space”) and areas that foster collaboration and engagement with co-workers. But they also want new office spaces dedicated to solo work.

And the office still is the preferred location for activities such as managing or being supported by management, collaborating and running meetings, and solving work-related issues, according to the survey.

Mary Vanac of the Cleveland Business Journal, a sister news organization, contributed to this story.