Downtown Jax office seems to be struggling in general and it cannot all be blamed on the pandemic. For comparison, office rents have been rising in South Florida and many new office buildings are coming online. Stephen Ross's new buildings in WPB are leasing for 6-7x what buildings in DT Jax are leasing at. Totally different markets, but just demonstrating that office is not yet dead.
https://therealdeal.com/miami/2024/07/12/office-asking-rents-rose-across-south-florida-in-q2/The following buildings are all leasing on Loop Net with very reasonable rates (Low to mid 20's per square foot):
225 Water Street has 250k square feet
301 West Bay (Southern Bell) 361k square feet
Old Prudential 389k square feet
815 South Main (Suddath) 105k square feet
Riverplace Tower 62k square feet
1200 Riverplace 86k square feet
200 West Forsyth 86k square feet
841 Prudential (Baptist) 53k square feet
501 Riverside (Everbank) 32k square feet
100 North Laura 38k square feet
There are many more small listings, but those are the bigger ones. Combined those buildings have 1.46 million square feet leasing or about 20% of Downtown's office space. That is more than 2 full Bank of America towers. When you add the smaller vacancies up, I'm sure it is closer to 30%, as CBRE said total downtown vacancy was 26% back in February.
Are DIA and the City in general too focused on residential and parks and not enough on office retention and relocation's?