Transaction volumes in Chicago remain at roughly 55% of their 2019 peak, and the city has logged fifteen straight quarters of negative net absorption. The data looks unambiguous. But according to one veteran workplace architect, the conclusions being drawn from it miss what is actually happening inside the market’s best-performing buildings.
Key Swipe Data’s Flaw
Brett Polich, Managing Principal at EWP Architects, a Chicago-based workplace design firm he founded in 2011, argues that the office market narrative has become heavily dependent on a narrow and unreliable set of metrics. Chief among them is key swipe data — the occupancy counts generated when employees badge into buildings.
Key swipe numbers measure physical entry events and nothing more. They do not distinguish between a building where tenants are thriving and one where they are struggling. They do not capture the quality of the space, the intentionality of the people using it, or the health of underlying lease relationships. Yet these counts are routinely treated as proxies for market health. “We’ve become dependent on the key swipe data, which is a terrible, inaccurate sense of where the office world is at,” Polich says. “It really doesn’t speak to attendance. It’s a small subset of someone who’s selling some data.”
When analysts layer that data onto negative absorption figures and declining transaction volumes, the resulting picture looks like a market in free fall. Polich says the reality is far more varied than those numbers suggest.
A Deeply Split Market
Fifteen quarters of negative net absorption and transaction volumes stuck at roughly half their pre-pandemic levels are not trivial data points. But Polich argues that these aggregate numbers obscure a market that is deeply split — and that the split matters more than the average.
Trophy-class office buildings in Chicago are performing well, and there may not be enough of them to meet current demand. That is a very different story from the one told by citywide absorption figures, which pool struggling secondary assets with high-performing trophy buildings to produce a blended number that accurately describes neither.
Polich says standard market reports fail to capture this distinction. “People infer from all of that that things are dire, and that couldn’t be further from the truth,” he says. His point is not that the market is healthy in any broad sense. It is that the tools used to assess it are producing a flattened, undifferentiated verdict that does not reflect the experience of well-positioned buildings and well-capitalized owners.
Bad Data, Bad Decisions
Misreading the data carries real consequences. When market reports consistently declare the office sector in crisis, building owners lose confidence in repositioning investments, tenants delay decisions, and lenders pull back from financing projects. The narrative feeds on itself — not because the underlying fundamentals are uniformly bad, but because the data used to describe them is too blunt to distinguish between assets that deserve investment and those that do not.
The economics compound the problem. Polich notes that the cost to execute an office project has quintupled over the last five years, while timelines have doubled or tripled. Those pressures push tenants toward longer lease terms at the very moment forecasting feels most uncertain — a combination that makes committing to a new space harder than it has ever been. For building owners, the calculus has shifted just as sharply. A spec suite that could deliver a return on investment in roughly three years five years ago now takes more than ten, requiring a landlord to re-lease the space two or three times before recovering the cost.
Polich also pushes back on the outsized attention given to high-profile return-to-office mandates. Each time a major employer like JPMorgan Chase announces a new workplace policy, it triggers broad speculation about what every other company will do. Those announcements, however, do not reflect the more varied, quieter reality of how most organizations are managing their office relationships. “Every time JP Morgan announces something about a mandatory thing in their workplace, it triggers rigorous discussion about what everyone else is doing,” he says.
The conversation has become too focused on a handful of visible data points and too disconnected from what is happening inside individual buildings and individual tenant relationships.
Project-Level Data Contradicts Headlines
While the aggregate data paints a bleak picture, activity at the project level tells a different story. Polich, who works across tenant engagements, building-owner consulting, and hospitality-adjacent design, says momentum inside the Chicago market has picked up considerably.
“There’s been more activity, more interest, more excitement, and more desire in the last 12 months than there has been in the last 60,” he says.
One signal worth watching is a shift in how younger workers are approaching the office. After an extended period when new graduates resisted in-person work, Polich says that tide appears to be turning. Recent hires are increasingly seeking out office environments — drawn, he believes, by the professional development and mentorship opportunities that in-person work provides. Whether that reflects a generational attitude shift or simply a reaction to years of remote isolation, it points in the same direction as the project-level momentum: toward a market finding its footing.
That does not erase the structural challenges the Chicago office market still faces. But it does suggest that aggregate metrics are lagging indicators of a recovery already underway. For investors, lenders, and tenants making decisions based on market data, the gap between headline numbers and on-the-ground activity raises a practical question. The tools currently used to assess the office market may be systematically undervaluing well-positioned assets while overstating distress across the sector. Whether that gap closes as better data becomes available — or whether the industry continues to navigate by key swipes and absorption figures — will shape how capital flows into Chicago’s office market in the years ahead.
