Business offices in Moscow are being optimized by 30% due to the second wave of COVID-19
The second wave of COVID-19 and mass transition to remote work will encourage owners of Moscow companies to reduce their office space by 20-30%, some of renters might move to a lower class property. This is reported by RIA Estate with reference to the representatives of consulting companies.
According to the decree of Sergei Sobyanin, all enterprises and organizations of the city are required to inform the Moscow government on a weekly basis about the transfer of at least 30% of employees to remote operation. Otherwise, violators will be fined or suspended.
In the opinion of Maria Zimina, the department director of the office estate Knight Frank, about a half of Moscow companies will want to make optimization, but not all of them will complete the process.
«If we talk about the reducing space potential, companies will try to achieve a reduction in office space on average by 20-30%», – she said.
Zimina thinks the tendency to optimize offices in the Moscow market due to mass transitions to remote work was observed in the second and third quarters of this year. At that time tenants and owners were forced to negotiate a reduction of leased space by selling excess office spaces to sublease for other companies or excluding these surpluses from the current contract. In MIBC «Moscow City» the share of vacant offices was 9.3% at the end of 2019, and — already 11.1% by September 2020.