Fresh air will be an office amenity
PHILADELPHIA — Not long ago, office landlords competed for tenants by advertising spacious roof decks and fancy exercise rooms.
Now they’re touting high air-circulation rates and advanced filtration setups.
As companies strategize how to safely reopen their offices after COVID-19 closures, ventilation systems that can help limit the spread of illness by siphoning away potentially infected indoor air have become a sought-after feature many properties lack in cities with aged business centers.
But the divide between companies that can afford the higher rent of better-ventilated offices and those that can’t threatens to yield a new breed of workplace “haves and have-nots,” said John Grossman, a real estate lawyer at Fox Rothschild LLP in Philadelphia.
“There’s just going to be a greater discrepancy,” he said.
Good ventilation systems aren’t the only thing office-design experts and health professionals are recommending to help stem the virus’ spread in white-collar settings. Other provisions include desk-encircling sneeze guards, floor markings to encourage social distancing, touchless elevator controls and frequent-cleaning schedules.
But heating, ventilation and airconditioning, or HVAC, systems play a key role in protecting
employee health by flushing away indoor air — which could bear tiny contaminated droplets produced when an infected person breathes, talks, coughs or sneezes — and replacing it with fresh air from outside the building, according to Qingyan Chen, who edits the scholarly journal Building and Environment as a mechanical engineering professor at Purdue University.
A modern ventilation system can swap out an entire building’s air supply multiple times every hour, lessening the amount of time infected air has to put workers at risk, said Joseph Matje, an HVAC specialist at J&M Engineering LLC in Philadelphia. Older networks tend to use the same indoor air for a longer time, mixing in outdoor air at a far lower rate, if at all, he said.
The new systems require large intake vents on a building’s exterior to draw in the outdoor air, wide ventilation shafts to carry that air to the building’s heating and cooling equipment, and powerful fans to move it all around, he said.
But systems like that didn’t become prevalent until after 1989, when the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers — the HVAC industry’s standards-setting organization — boosted the volume of fresh air ventilation networks were required to provide to offices.
More than 83% of Philadelphia’s 98 million square feet of office space was built in 1989 or earlier, compared with an average of 63% across the United States, according to the real estate data tracker CoStar Group.
Many of Philadelphia’s office buildings constructed before that time have since been upgraded with more modern HVAC systems, said Hetherington Smith, Philadelphia branch manager for the commercial brokerage Savills Inc.
Among Philadelphia property owners promoting their modern HVAC systems is Brandywine Realty Trust, the city’s dominant commercial landlord with 6.3 million square feet of offices.
Brandywine said it has its buildings’ systems set to maximize the intake of fresh outside air through its buildings and that its properties are equipped with systems capable of moving air through the thicker, highdensity filters.
Hallandale Beach, Fla.based Accesso Partners LLC, which owns the 20 -story 1515 Market St. office building near City Hall, has been tinkering with its HVAC system to ramp up the number of times per hour it can flush outside air through its offices. Accesso operations director Tony Clasen said the tower is studded with intake vents along its facade to allow in plenty of fresh air, despite its 1960s vintage. It’s a topic of keen interest to tenants, he said.
“Three or four months ago, the only call we got was ‘We’re hot,’ or ‘We’re cold,’” Mr. Clasen said. “Today, they call and say: ‘We’re here. What has the building done? How do you filter the air?’”
Not all Philadelphia office landlords have a satisfying answer to that question.
Ms. Smith, of Savills, said a tenant she represents at an older, poorly ventilated building is planning to negotiate lease renewals to allow for an easy exit should its landlord fail to live up to a commitment to install HVAC upgrades.
Things get more complicated, though, on the lower rungs of the commercial real estate ladder, where less affluent businesses pay lower rents for space in less desirable buildings.
That disparity between upmarket and downmarket office rents is especially acute in Philadelphia, where asking prices are 77% higher for upscale “Class A” space than low-end “Class C” space, compared with a 56% difference in the national averages for such rents, according to CoStar.
Those “Class C” buildings are the ones where outdated HVAC systems are most commonly found, but they’re also unlikely to generate sufficient rental income to pay for upgrades, putting their owners — and tenants — in a bind.
“There’s kind of a Catch22,” said John D. Macomber, a lecturer at Harvard Business School who co-authored the book “Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity.” “Will the landlords be able to do those renovations and get more rent? If they don’t think they’re going to get more rent, they’re not going to do the renovations.”
Upgrading outdated ventilation systems can cost in the range of $30 per square foot, according to Mr. Matje, the HVAC specialist. That would work out to a $2.5 million price tag for an 84,000-squarefoot building, the average in Center City, according to CoStar. New systems also eat into a building’s revenue-generating rentable space, Mr. Matje said.