The proportion of employees working from home is still high after the pandemic. Some companies are therefore reducing office jobs.
Even after the end of the corona pandemic, many office jobs in Germany remain empty. According to an estimate by the Ifo Institute, 12.3 percent of jobs are currently vacant on an average day because employees work from home. That is about three times as much as in 2019 before the start of the corona pandemic, said the Munich economic research institute.
Particularly empty offices can be found in the information technology, advertising and market research as well as management consulting sectors – in these sectors, the home office quotas are high according to earlier Ifo studies.
According to Ifo, some companies are therefore reducing their space requirements. “This can have consequences for the real estate market, which is already under pressure due to higher interest rates and construction costs,” said Ifo employee Simon Krause. The decline in office use is hitting inner cities particularly hard, where there are an above-average number of offices.
The source is the Ifo Institute’s monthly economic surveys of several thousand companies.
Source: Stern
