The Numbers Behind APAC’s Office Reset: What CBRE’s Survey Signals for Real Estate Intelligence
Every so often a single dataset captures a shift that anecdotes alone cannot. CBRE’s 2026 Asia Pacific Office Occupier Survey is one of those datasets. It tells us that 88 percent of firms now have employees in the office at least three days a week, the highest share recorded since the pandemic began. It also tells us that 85 percent of occupiers believe attendance has settled into a steady state. Read together, those two figures are not just workplace trivia. They are a signal that the region’s corporate real estate decisions can finally be built on stable ground rather than shifting assumptions.
What interests me most as someone who studies patterns in property data is the second half of the survey: the acceleration of AI adoption inside corporate real estate functions. Forty six percent of respondents now describe themselves as AI adopters or active movers, up from just 9 percent in 2024. That is not incremental change. That is a five fold jump in two years, the kind of curve that usually precedes a structural shift in how an industry operates, not just how it talks about itself.
Tom Gaffney, CBRE’s Head of Leasing for Asia Pacific, framed this as a natural progression once attendance and utilisation stabilised. Once occupiers stop asking whether people will return, they can redirect their attention toward transforming the workplace itself, using data to sharpen decision making, operational efficiency, and workplace management rather than simply tracking headcount.
Here is the nuance the data forces us to sit with. More than half of surveyed occupiers say AI has had no measurable impact on their real estate requirements yet, or that it is simply too early to tell how it will affect workforce size or office footprints. That gap between adoption and measurable outcome is exactly where property intelligence becomes valuable. Tools are being deployed faster than their effects can be quantified, which means the organizations paying closest attention to their own occupancy, utilisation, and efficiency signals will be the ones who understand the real impact first, well before it shows up in headline demand figures.
A five fold rise in AI adoption within two years is a structural signal, not a passing trend.
For readers tracking the intelligence layer behind housing and commercial property decisions, this survey is a useful marker. Attendance stability gives occupiers a reliable baseline to model against. Rising AI adoption gives them new tools to interrogate that baseline. The organizations that combine both, steady behavioural data with sharper analytical tooling, will be the ones best positioned to make office footprint decisions grounded in evidence rather than instinct, even while the broader market waits to see how AI ultimately reshapes demand.
Source: Real Estate Asia, “APAC office attendance reaches new equilibrium as AI adoption accelerates”
