Demand for Mexico City's Best Offices Has Outrun the Supply

Mexico City's office vacancy fell to 17.2 percent at the end of the first quarter, down 2.3 points on the same quarter a year earlier. That is the topline, and it is the least interesting number in the report. The one that matters is 11.1 percent, which is the vacancy rate in the central business district, and what it implies about where a tenant who cannot find space there goes next.

The figures come from CBRE, whose Mexico president Lyman Daniels put it more bluntly than a research note usually does. "The appetite for the CBD is insatiable, but the supply is finite."

Where the tightness actually is

Reforma is the tightest corridor in the city at 10.19 percent vacancy, with average asking rents of $27.46 per square metre. Polanco sits at 11.5 percent and $27. Lomas-Palmas is at 11.52 percent and carries the highest asking rents of the three at $28.51.

Against a total Class A and A+ inventory of 7.4 million square metres, of which 6.2 million is occupied, those are not distressed markets. They are markets where a company wanting a contiguous floor plate in the best address has a short list and a short deadline.

Gross absorption in the quarter came to 110,000 square metres, and the composition of it is revealing: 75 percent was renewals, expansions and sub-leasing rather than new tenants arriving. The CBD took 44 percent of net absorption and Insurgentes took 36 percent.

Who is taking the space

Technology and IT accounted for 42 percent of transactions, pharmaceutical 18 percent, and corporate services 16 percent. That is a different tenant mix from the one that filled these buildings a decade ago, and it is the practical face of the nearshoring argument that has been made about Mexico in the abstract for several years.

What happens when the centre fills

This is the part with consequences. Nine projects totalling 351,000 square metres are under construction for delivery between 2026 and 2028, 28 percent of it already pre-leased before completion. Most of that pipeline sits in the CBD corridors, which is where developers want to be for the same reason tenants do.

But a pipeline arriving over three years does not solve a shortage now. CBRE's reading is that the scarcity of contiguous space in the CBD is likely to push companies either into Class B buildings within the same corridors, or outward to submarkets like Santa Fe and Insurgentes that can absorb requirements the centre no longer fits.

For anyone looking at Mexico City office space rather than at it as an abstraction, that is the sentence to underline. The demand is not softening. It is relocating.

What this does and does not prove

It does not prove the whole market is strong. A city-wide vacancy of 17.2 percent means roughly one square metre in six of Class A and A+ stock is empty, and the average conceals a wide gap between a Reforma tower at 10 percent and the weaker end of the market. Annual inventory growth of 1 percent is modest.

Nor is a quarter a trend. These are first-quarter figures published in May, and the direction has been improving rather than dramatic.

What the data does establish is a clear ranking. The best corridors are tight, the tenants taking space are in sectors that are growing, and the overflow has somewhere obvious to go. For a buyer weighing a floor in Santa Fe against one in Polanco, that overflow is the whole question.

Sources: CBRE Mexico City office market data for the first quarter of 2026, including vacancy by submarket, inventory and occupied area, gross absorption and its composition, net absorption by submarket, asking rents, tenant sector mix and the construction pipeline, as reported by Mexico Business News, 12 May 2026. Quotation from Lyman Daniels, president of CBRE Mexico, same report.