The Wall Street Journal this month catalogued a wave of US office buildings selling at 90% or more below peak value. This includes a Chicago tower going for $4 million (down from $68 million) and Denver’s Energy Center for $5.3 million (down from $176 million). MSCI counted 204 distressed office sales last year, up from 133 in 2024, totalling $5.2 billion.
The numbers are real, but the mechanism matters more than the headline. CBRE data shows that nearly 60% of US buildings over 800,000 sqft (about 75,000 sqm) have dropped below 90% occupancy since the pandemic, compared with just 40% before Covid. Only 8% of US office stock is capturing essentially all new tenant demand — those buildings absorbed 4.7 million sqm since 2020 while the other 92% shed 17 million sqm.
But it’s not just remote work driving the trend. It’s the American corporate habit of leasing enormous blocks for operational
efficiency — then shedding them in a single strategic decision. Chevron vacated a 1.4 million sqft campus. Google subleased 1.4 million sqft. When a tenant occupying 30–50% of a tower leaves, the building collapses economically overnight.
Of course, it takes two to tango. No one forced landlords into such concentrated bets on single tenants, or lenders to underwrite the deals. The entire US office ecosystem — developer, landlord, bank, tenant — was optimized for scale and efficiency. The whole system seems based around a world in which corporations only ever grow. When that assumption broke, the losses were structural, not cyclical.
Central Europe’s office markets evolved differently. Prague’s typical building runs 15,000–25,000 sqm with five to fifteen
tenants. Shared-service centres — the anchor tenants of the CEE office market — typically lease 5,000–11,000 sqm: significant, but rarely the whole building. When one leaves, the landlord faces a painful but survivable re-leasing exercise, not an existential crisis.
That structural resilience shouldn’t breed complacency. The interest-rate arithmetic compressing US values works the same way across the Eurozone. And the WSJ flags a threat CEE hasn’t priced in: the possibility that AI reshapes the white-collar headcount that shared-service centres depend on. The US fire sale is a story about building design meeting corporate volatility. The question for Prague and Warsaw is whether AI creates the same kind of cliff events — just with a different trigger.
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