View from the top: Nelson Mills

摘要

New York is starting to look busy again. With Covid-19 hospitalisations in the city falling to their lowest levels since mid-March, restaurants are reopening, people are heading back onto the streets and the Big Apple is cautiously coming back to life. But for commercial landlords, there is still one big problem: all the city's offices are virtually empty. "I'd say our buildings are less than 5% occupied today," says Nelson Mills, chief executive of US-listed REIT Columbia Property Trust. Mills' company controls more than 6m sq ft of office property rented in New York, San Francisco, Washington DC and Boston, and he is one of the few residents in the city to have returned to his workplace in recent weeks.