# Why the office market will eventually rise again

By [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com) · 2026-07-13

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Real estate development is cyclical. Supply adjusts slowly to demand, and so it's common for developers to get ahead of their skis and build too much space. This is what happened in the 1980s when American developers built more office space than in all previous years of the republic's history (yes, [it's true](https://www.city-journal.org/article/navigating-the-nineties#:~:text=The%20decline%20in%20the%20office,4.6%20percent%20to%2016.9%20percent.https://www.city-journal.org/article/navigating-the-nineties#:~:text=The%20decline%20in%20the%20office,4.6%20percent%20to%2016.9%20percent.)), and then nationwide vacancy rates went from 4.6% to 16.9%. And it's what happened following the dot-com crash when office vacancy in Silicon Valley went from [almost 0% to over 20%](https://jointventure.org/blog/2738-beyond-boom-and-bust-silicon-valley-office-space-faces-a-new-reality#:~:text=The%20tight%20market%20spurred%20waves,construction%20ground%20to%20a%20halt.https://jointventure.org/blog/2738-beyond-boom-and-bust-silicon-valley-office-space-faces-a-new-reality#:~:text=The%20tight%20market%20spurred%20waves,construction%20ground%20to%20a%20halt.).

Today, things feel kind of similar.

According to [Cushman & Wakefield](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/local-business/as-downtown-seattle-offices-empty-city-facing-years-of-zombie-towers/https://www.seattletimes.com/business/local-business/as-downtown-seattle-offices-empty-city-facing-years-of-zombie-towers/), nearly 37% of the office space in downtown Seattle is now vacant. Since 2020, it is estimated that these office properties have in aggregate lost about $15 billion, or almost half, of their value. This has people repeating the regular refrain that "this time is different" and that "the office market may never come back." And indeed, the commonly held belief is that this time isn't just cyclical, it's also structural. How and where we work has changed.

But unless you believe that offices as a spatial construct will fully cease to exist at some indeterminate point in the future, then the reality is that the demand curve has simply shifted. We may not need office space in quite the same way, but we will still need some office space. This means that, at some point, we will find a new supply-and-demand equilibrium and, at some point, developers will get back to building, and overbuilding, office buildings. It's just impossible to determine when that might be.

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_Cover photo by_ [_Zhifei Zhou_](https://unsplash.com/@phoebezzf?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)

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*Originally published on [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com/why-the-office-market-will-eventually-rise-again)*