Downtown Seattle Mobility Patterns

While the COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed the office workplace, many high-profile employers in the Puget Sound region and beyond have begun to implement more stringent return-to-office policies. Some have even hinted at using employee badge-swipe data to enforce workplace requirements, although few have actually done so. Unemployment levels remain at historically very low levels and in many industries, such as tech, employees are perceived to have a great deal of leverage in negotiations over workplace expectations.

Notably, the largest regional employer mandated its office-using employees to plan with their respective managers to implement new workplace routines and physically report to work on some weekdays. This new policy was made effective May 1, 2023, and has been closely watched by other employers in the Seattle market, as well as transit authorities and retail and hospitality businesses. Four months past the May 1 policy, this report provides updated information pertaining to downtown Seattle’s employee foot traffic in CBRE’s five most centrally located downtown office submarkets: Lake Union, Denny Triangle, Waterfront, Seattle CBD and Pioneer Square.

This document addresses when employees are physically present and how long they typically remain downtown. Worker visits are identified in the anonymized cell phone user data as visits (i) to designated work locations with a dwell time for a minimum of four hours during workdays and (ii) occurred on a consecutive basis (i.e., multiple days per week for many weeks). Visits to downtown workplaces by tourists and residents are excluded from the results presented.