In my town, most office rents are all time high and there are a lot of empty units, at the same itme. It's been like this for years, even before Covid. Howeve

In my town, most office rents are all time high and there are a lot of empty units, at the same itme. It's been like this for years, even before Covid. However, in the few years before Covid there were more spaces advertised than there are now, and that number went up a little in 2020. But now, there's not much on the local the market, even tbough I can see plenty of empty buildings when I walk around. We have a lot of landlords here who, I'm told, don't care that much about the rent, which is also why they don't try particularly hard to entice tenants. It can be remarkably hard to rent a space even when it's been empty for years and advertised as available, as the agents come up with all sorts of reasons and incompetencies. I am part of an organisation that tried to rent a business unit that was advertised and which we'd been enthusiastically shown around, and after a year of trying we gave up on it because we just couldn't get sane responses from the agent. The unit was still empty when we gave up on it. There are quite a few that are not advertised but have been empty for years. Some of those are actually available, but you have to talk with property agents and ask for the lists of properties they have on file which are available if you really want to pursue them, but are not advertised. If you don't know, you don't know. I currently rent a small office in a larger office building. The rent I'm paying is relatively low for the area, but it's inching up citing "market rates", i.e. high, even though most of the units in the building how now been empty for multiple years. The property agent told me my particular landlord doesn't really care about the rent as they have other long-term plans for the building. So it's disappointing they still charge as much as they do for that rent they don't really care about. I'd love to take the empty unit next door to expand my office; it's likely to remain empty for another year anyway. I was told a few years ago, before Covid, this dynamic is for two reasons. (1) The big landlords often prefer to hold out for a large, higher-paying tenant with a long lease, even if it means no rent for a year or two by turning down lower-paying tenants meanwhile. This makes little sense to me as they could presumably offer flexible terms where they can give notice at any time, but hey I'm not a landlord. And (2) some of them intend to wait for the building to be empty for long enough (20 years) that they eventually obtain automatic permission to demolish the building and replace it with a new build, either apartments or a new building with more floors and maximum footprint. I don't know if either of these reasons are true.