People keep coming back to the office, says Kastle Systems' Mark Ein

Let’s bring in Castle Systems executive chair Mark EIN. The company, as you know, provides security solutions for roughly 41,000 businesses nationwide and tracks office foot traffic across its client base. Mark, great to have you. We watch your data religiously. And I wonder if you buy into the argument that somehow they’re topping out here. No, I mean, the trend is clearly people are coming back to the office incrementally more and more and more. I think particularly as well as SL Green, we see Class A space increasing faster than the average office space. If you look what’s really happening is the average occupancy across the week is plateauing a bit, but the peak days are increasing. So two years ago the peak day was around 4550% last year 5560, this year already it’s coming up over 60%. And then in certain markets like in Texas markets, Austins at almost 80%. And So what you’re seeing is geographies are different, office types are different, and but it continues to go up in terms of people coming back to the office at least some of the time. One of the the narratives that’s getting threaded is exposure to certain industries where in office work is more critical. They point to financial services as one reason why maybe New York’s doing well. You buy that. I totally buy it. If you look at it, there’s certain industries that since the beginning have been more aggressive in getting people back. You know, David Solomon, Jamie Dimon early on made statements about this. Jane Frazier made statements about it. And so you see that and I think the Google announcement, like one of the things that happens is when the big companies and the iconic CEOs put stakes in the ground, it makes it easier for other companies to follow. I do agree that CEOs want their people back. In some places in the country and some industries, it’s easier than others. But the more that people do it, it’s easier for other companies to do it as well. We’re looking at some data here on the screen that that looks at Friday, which is an interesting story right now. We’ve had very sophisticated investors on our air, Stevie Cohen with a long term thesis that maybe we wind up, we end up with the four day workweek, which leads to certain trades for investors like leisure and travel and in his case golf. I wonder if you think that makes sense and the data does bear this out. So interestingly, before COVID, the difference in the low day, which is Friday, and the peak day, which is middle of the week was roughly 15 percentage points. In the middle of COVID, it was almost flat. It was 1 to 5%, people weren’t in the office. Now it’s closer to 25 or 30%. The occupancy between difference between the peak days and the low days. And in New York City and Chicago last week, the difference was 40% difference to 65% versus 25% difference. So I do think even the companies that want people back, most of them do make accommodations for a three or four day week, but Friday is usually being a day off. Of all the metros you track, which do you find either most instructive or interesting or most improved or maybe a big laggard? Is there one that stands out on a relative basis? You know, Carl, what’s been interesting is since the beginning, the trends have been very consistent. Northern California consistently has of lower numbers of people in the office. Texas has consistently been higher and the rest have been in the middle. I think the interesting thing is New York, which obviously was hit, it’s now been a while, but you remember it was hit hardest by COVID. It was at the bottom for a long time and now it’s creeping up closer to the top. But what’s interesting is just these regional differences, whether it’s cultural or industry mix, have been throughout the four years that we’ve been studying this.