‘Wear your mask and go back to work’ - The Dallas Morning News

John Zogg is back at his desk.

And he thinks more Dallas area workers will be back in the office soon.

“Wear your mask and go back to work,” said Zogg, managing director at Crescent Real Estate, said in a Thursday conference call with the economic development group Downtown Dallas Inc.

Zogg said he headed home early in the pandemic like most Dallas office workers, but he came back to the office just weeks later.

“There is nothing to replace the face-to-face interaction with the team,” said Zogg, whose company is one of the major owners of operators of office buildings in Dallas' Uptown and downtown districts. “I was dying at home to get back to work and see people.”

So far, most Dallas office employees are still working at home.

About 36% of Dallas-Fort Worth office workers have returned to the workplace, according to a recent survey. That’s the highest average in the country.

But in the downtown Dallas area, where you’ll usually find about 135,000 workers on the average weekday, only about a quarter of them are back at their desks.

“Our buildings are probably on average 25% occupied today,” Zogg said. “Right now most of our customers — the ones that aren’t already here — another 50% are talking about coming back Jan. 1.”

He said Crescent has been preparing to make its properties safe for returning workers. “We’ve used this time when the buildings are very low occupancy,” Zogg said. "We’ve gone through and updated a lot of systems.

“We are getting them to the point where we think they ought to be in a post-COVID world.”

Zogg said Crescent has worked with restaurant tenants in its properties to ensure that they are still in business when the office workers return.

“In our downtown and Uptown portfolio, we have over 20 restaurants,” he said. "We want all of our restaurant partners to stay.

“All 20 of those leases have been redone in some fashion.”

John Zogg is a managing director with Crescent Real Estate.(Crescent Real Estate )

Crescent’s office building tenants have so far stayed the course. “Most of our office customers are in good shape,” Zogg said.

The real estate investor isn’t making big changes in its office sector playbook.

“Crescent’s take is we should be patient,” Zogg said. "There is a lot of noise out there about what people are doing.

“I think it’s way too early to say we are all going to work from home or we are going to need more space because of distance,” he said.

With the pandemic, office leasing in North Texas and major U.S. markets has slowed to a trickle. Many deals were delayed or put on indefinite hold.

“March 10, we were in a great economy and things were going fantastic, and then the music stopped for the pandemic,” Zogg said.

He predicts things will bounce back here when COVID-19 eases.

“I’m super bullish on Dallas because we are very well set up post-pandemic — how spread out we are and what kind of assets we have,” Zogg said. “All of the factors that made Dallas work are magnified today.”

Zogg said there are already signs of a coming surge in company moves to North Texas. “I know we are going to see a lot of relocation activity,” he said. "The inquiries are up at least three-fold.

“We’re ready to bring business to this area.”

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