Canberra CBD worker boost, but office occupancy levels still lag

Data from the survey showed a slow march back to offices in the central business district after Canberra's two-month lockdown, which lifted in October 2021.

The rates climbed to 17 per cent in November, dropping back to 7 per cent during January's holiday period, before a return of 21 per cent in February.

Property Council of Australia chief executive Ken Morrison said the jump in occupancy rates showed "great momentum", with Sydney and Melbourne recording similar rises.

"[However] Canberra's, city centers are not full and at 45 per cent that is still an unhealthy level of occupancy, despite the progress that's been made in the last month," Mr Morrison said.

Nationally, over 50 per cent of respondents expected a material increase in occupancy rates would take longer than three months.

As public and private sectors assess their future work models, property owners and businesses who profit from office tenancies are eager to reaffirm the perks.

Mr Morrison said that Canberra had seen an increase in demand for CBD office space in the last six months, and that the Property Council was most concerned with speeding up the return.

"We have this transition phase that we're in at the moment ... and if we're making that transition in a shorter period of time, that means that businesses that rely on office workers being back, have their lifeblood returned and they're able to survive," he said.

In February, Chief Minister Andrew Barr defended the territory's move to a hybrid work model for public servants, saying government staff are not "just consumer fodder".

"Not everybody will come into the office every day, we're not shoehorning people back in," he said, describing plans whereby staff are allowed to work from home, from offices across Canberra, and outside of traditional 9-5 hours.

The ACT government will introduce so-called flexi offices at Tuggeranong and Belconnen to allow staff to work from an office close by rather than their directorate's home base.

These spaces are being designed within existing ACT government offices and will begin operating in the first quarter of the new financial year.

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Eighty-one per cent of Commonwealth public servants returned to a mix of working from the office and at home during the fortnight ending March 25, with just 19 per cent working exclusively from home.

The owner of Brindabella Cafe in Barton's RG Casey Building, which houses DFAT offices, said since February public servants had surged back.

"Certainly by the beginning of March, it was much, much busier and more people around," Skye Palmer said.

"There are still people who are working some days at home, and we've had our business here for 23 years, so certainly before COVID we would have had a much greater understanding ... which days would be busier.

"But since COVID, it's very hard to tell what days are going to be more busy than others, a pattern hasn't quite emerged."

The cafe closed during lockdown in 2021 and has since seen a strong recovery, but Ms Palmer said she thought changes to the way meetings are held have hampered the catering side of the business.

"The side our business which has not come back as strong is more of the catering side," she said.

"I think there's less meetings maybe, [less] gathering people in meetings and doing that style of catering."

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