An unexpected phenomenon has developed in the office market due to the home office

According to data published by ifo (ifo Institut – Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung an der Universität München e.V.) on Monday, in Germany this April, 12.3 percent of workstations in offices were not fully utilized on an average day due to working from home. In 2019, the year before the start of the coronavirus epidemic, this ratio was only 4.6 percent, so the ratio of unused workstations in offices roughly tripled, said Simon Krause, ifo expert.

Behind the average data, however, there are significant differences by sector in terms of the proportion of working from home and thus unused office workstations. In the service sector, the proportion of unused workstations in offices increased from 6.2 percent registered in 2019 to 16.8 percent by April this year. At the same time, in the manufacturing industry, this ratio rose from 3.1 percent in 2019 to 9.6 percent. In retail trade, the ratio increased from 3.2 percent to 5.8 percent, and in the construction industry it rose from 1.7 percent to only 2.5 percent. In particular, there is a lot of unused office space in the fields of IT, advertising and market research, management consulting and the pharmaceutical industry, ifo said in a statement.