Asia Pacific office demand is real, and it is premium

Half of Asia Pacific office occupiers expect their footprint to grow over the next three years, and 88 percent report employees in the office at least three days a week—the highest level CBRE has recorded since the pandemic—according to its 2026 Asia Pacific Office Occupier Survey. Another 85 percent of respondents call attendance a settled question, prompting Tom Gaffney, CBRE's head of leasing for the region, to frame the moment as a new equilibrium in which occupiers are "selectively growing their portfolio and prioritizing premium workplaces."

The survey's read-through for US office capital is narrower than the headline invites, its respondents are Asia Pacific occupiers, and the coverage does not say what their intentions imply for American attendance or leasing, but what it does establish is where office demand goes when it shows up: to premium space, the same destination it has on this side of the Pacific. That is the split doing the repricing here, where $100 million of renovation capital at 1411 Broadway turned into more than 182,000 square feet of Midtown leases, and where a building 29.5 percent empty changed hands in 30 days at $205 a square foot. For an allocator with a global office mandate, that is a case for underwriting buildings rather than geographies.

The sharpest movement in the survey is in AI, where 46 percent of respondents describe themselves as adopters or active movers in applying AI to corporate real estate operations, up from 9 percent in 2024—a fivefold rise in two years. The published findings do not say how that adoption nets out for occupied square footage; the likelier direction is compression per desk paired with concentration into fewer, better buildings, which would sharpen the premium tilt rather than reverse it.

Treat the expansion figure as intent, not a leasing pipeline: half the respondents will revisit the number at their next budget cycle, and CBRE's own framing puts the growth in premium product rather than in the market's aggregate footprint. As this publication has argued, office is repricing asset by asset, not index by index, and a survey that lands half its regional demand on premium workplaces belongs in that ledger. The commodity end still clears on residual value: the trade CBRE brokered, two Norwalk office buildings sold to a joint venture planning 286 apartments, was underwritten by a $75.5 million construction loan for the site's next use rather than by a return-to-office story.

A three-year horizon cannot be graded before 2029, which is why this belongs in strategy decks rather than underwriting models. Watch premium net absorption against sublease availability in the region's next two quarters of leasing data.