Many of the city’s startups have continued hiring despite their remote operations, fueled in part by a venture capital funding market that has continued cutting checks for growing companies despite economic uncertainty. But those firms have often followed the leads of tech giants Google and Facebook—who do not plan to return to the office until next summer at the earliest.
About a quarter of the firms in the survey—companies in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles were included—do not expect to return to the office until there is a widely distributed vaccine. The survey included testimony from companies throughout the U.S., but New York companies represented the largest sample, at 19%, compared with Silicon Valley’s 15%.
The good news for the city’s real estate market is that the tech giants have committed to having offices in the future. During the summer Facebook signed a 730,000-square-foot lease at Vornado’s Farley Building by Penn Station. Amazon purchased the Lord & Taylor building in Midtown in March and plans to hire 2,000 workers by 2023 to staff the office.
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