Last month, we released a study on commercial real estate interest recovery after the mid-March slump caused by COVID-19 concerns. We found that traffic on our commercial real estate listings website, CommercialCafe, and search volumes for commercial real estate terms on Google Trends were increasing steadily. This week, we revisited the data to see if the trend continued.

Here are some highlights:

• Our previous report found that, after a 27% dip in mid-March, commercial searches on our website registered increases throughout April, followed by another 8% week-over-week growth between May 3 and May 9.

• Since then, searches for commercial listings on CommercialCafe have seen six weeks of almost steady growth. Between June 7 and June 13, we’ve seen an increase in traffic of 4% week-over-week.

• These prospective tenants weren’t simply browsing listings on our website. We also noticed an increase in the number of people contacting brokers through CommercialCafe.

• Our Google Trends analysis for the terms “commercial real estate,” “commercial property,” and “office for rent” mirrors CommercialCafe traffic data. These searches are closing in on pre-crisis levels, which is remarkable given the strong first two months of 2020.

Read the full update, which includes the previous data, here: https://www.commercialcafe.com/blog/covid-update-cre-searches-recover/

Our previous study also included a survey about the current crisis and its effect on office space searches. Out of our respondents at the time, 44% said they are ready to commit to a lease when they find the right space, while only 11% have postponed their search.

You can check the full survey results here: https://www.commercialcafe.com/blog/commercial-real-estate-searches-recover/