The crowded Bryant Park area will soon become even busier.
The largest tenant at 1095 West 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue, software giant Salesforce, is preparing to bring most of its employees back to the office.
An internal Salesforce memo told staff that most employees should be back at their desks by October 1, according to the online news site San Francisco Standard.
The directive appears to apply to staff everywhere Salesforce is based, not just at its San Francisco headquarters.
“Selected employees in the Sales, Workplace Services, Data Center Engineering and Onsite Support Technician functions who report to the Chief Information Officer will be required to come into the office four to five days a week beginning October 1st,” the memo reported.
Most other departments will be required to come into the office three days a week.
A Salesforce spokesperson did not respond to our questions about New York or the October 1 deadline, saying only that “Salesforce has always been a hybrid company. Our guidelines prioritize in-person connections, but we also recognize the value of working away from the office.”
A representative for CBRE, Salesforce’s national leasing agent, declined to comment.
But the company appears to be carefully walking back comments made by CEO Marc Benioff in 2022 that “mandating office work will never work.”
Roads and sidewalks around 1095 Sixth are already becoming more crowded, reflecting a much more widespread return to the office than previously reported.
“It’s so crowded, you can only walk half the time. It’s definitely as crowded or even more crowded than it was in 2019,” said Dan Biederman, founder of the Bryant Park Corporation.
“The park is crowded with office workers and tourists,” he said.
The perception that many employees have abandoned or been forced to work from home is backed up by new data from Placer.ai, which monitors office visits based on location data from mobile devices.
According to Placer.ai, office visits in the New York City metropolitan area (which includes the smaller markets of Newark and Jersey City) rose to 83.9% of 2019 levels in May and 85% in June.
These figures stand in stark contrast to studies touting declining returns and are widely cited by journalists eager to stoke the collapse of the office market.
Indeed, there are signs that Manhattan’s office slump may be bottoming out, at least for prime real estate: CBRE reported that second-quarter leasing volumes were up 35% compared with the same period in 2023.
SL Green, the city’s largest commercial landlord, said in its second-quarter earnings report that it expects to meet its goal of signing 2 million square feet of leases this year after landlord Ares Management nearly doubled its space at 245 Park Avenue.
Blackstone, the world’s largest commercial real estate owner, plans to add 250,000 square feet to its space at 345 Park Avenue in Rudin.
Manhattan’s vacancy rate is over 17 percent and is unlikely to fall much, due to an oversupply of old, undesirable space, crippling interest rates and a plethora of properties on the brink of foreclosure.
But those who see only catastrophe ahead are clearly not paying attention to the real world.
