Cautiously strategic investment still prevails across the U.S. office sector: While some recovery has occurred in the national market, it has not been equally distributed. Top-tier properties in key locations still notably outperform other tiers in terms of leasing and occupancy.
In order to keep up with evolution in the industry, we set out to capture key performance trends across the 100 largest office markets in the U.S. in a series of quarterly ranking reports, which compare and score markets across several metric categories: rents, vacancy, pipeline, evolution of the coworking space scene, upcoming loan maturities, and quarterly shifts in online searches for both traditional and flexible office space.
For this Q1 2025 office markets ranking report, we used commercial real estate data from CommercialEdge, CoworkingCafe, and Yardi Matrix, as well as analysis of Google search trends. For fairer comparison, we divided the data set into two size groups and chose the cutoff threshold to be at 100 million square feet.
Here are some of the key highlights:
Charlotte garnered the 8th-highest total score (59.1 points) among markets smaller than 100 million square feet.
- Average asking rents for office space saw the 7th-largest increase year-over-year and Charlotte was one of only nine markets in this ranking where rents went up more than 10% since Q1 2024.
- Chalotte had the 6th-most office space under construction — 1,419,903 square feet — which made for the ninth-largest development pipeline as a percentage of stock (1.6%)
