Office occupancy is back at 60%, and the deal flow shows it.

Office is back at 60%. That's the headline from this spring's tracker data, Kastle's badge-swipe index, JLL's research desk, anyone running occupancy sensors in Class A buildings. It is not 2019, and it may never be. But "60%-stable" is a different market than "40%-and-falling," and the deal flow on our pipeline is starting to reflect it.

What we're seeing in the pipeline

The volume of new tenant-rep mandates on DealDesk is up meaningfully quarter-over-quarter. More telling: the average size of the requirement has crept up too. For most of 2024-2025, the median requirement on the platform was 2,000-4,000 square feet, small users, post-COVID downsizers, lawyers and consulting boutiques. This spring it's 5,000-9,000. That's mid-market firms re-committing to office, not just startups taking flex space.

The other shift is geographic. Sun Belt deal flow has been strong for years, but we're seeing renewed velocity in the harder-hit gateway markets, specifically Manhattan, Boston back office, and Chicago Loop. The bottom is in. The bottom was in some time ago, in fact, but the deal volume took 12-18 months to follow.

Why occupancy and deal flow aren't the same metric

It's worth saying that occupancy and tenant-rep deal volume measure different things. Occupancy is how full the existing buildings are. Tenant-rep deal volume is how many companies are renegotiating, expanding, or signing new leases. In the early phase of a recovery, those metrics diverge: deals get done before bodies show up at desks.

What we're seeing is that the lag is closing. Renewal cycles signed in 2021-2022 (the bottom of the WFH-everything era) are coming up for their first natural extension. Tenants who shrunk by 30-50% then are now sitting on "we kind of need more room than this" problems. That's a deal-driver that doesn't depend on any return-to-office mandate.

Where the AI angle comes in

Recoveries are when broker workload spikes. More requirements, more tours, more LOIs, more comparison spreadsheets. The brokers who built lean operating muscle in the down cycle, the ones who learned to draft LOIs in 30 minutes instead of three hours, who turn around abstracts the same day instead of next week, are the ones picking up share now.

Volume rewards leverage. If your firm is still routing every counter-LOI through a senior partner's manual edits and every lease abstract through a paralegal queue, you're going to fall behind in this cycle. Not because the work is hard. Because there's more of it.

We built DealDesk for this exact moment. The bet was that the next office-leasing recovery would happen in a market where AI tools had matured enough to absorb the volume spike without firms needing to staff up. We think that bet is paying off this quarter.