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AI influences everything, so it should not surprise that the demand for AI-specific technical talents in certain cities promotes real estate demand in office, residential and even retail stores.
In the United States and Canada, the technology worker with AI skills grew by more than 50%to 517,000 after a CBRE analysis of LinkedIn data from mid-2024 to mid-2025. This talent focuses most in the San Francisco Bay, New York City, Seattle, Toronto and Washington, DC The Top Drei made 35% of the national total.
Overall, the New York Metropolitan region last year last year most AI-Tech talents with absolute numbers (with 20,000 new AI qualified workers). Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Toronto and Washington, DC, each recorded 75% with these employees or more compared to the previous year.
Not all of this growth are new jobs, but some are new skills because technology workers increased their skills to carry out AI-related tasks and system developments. However, some entered the workforce with these skills.
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“With this AI revolution, it was a fundamental player for the city of San Francisco, because this is really big for the AI ​​revolution and where most of these important top-class companies such as Openaai are,” said Colin Yasukochi, Managing Director of Tech Insights Center from CBRE.
The Silicon Valley was of course the initial heart of the tech sector, but the AI ​​seems to have longer limbs that use cities and sectors in which the basic technologies are now withdrawing. Part of this is that the Tech talents of AI from the so-called fire group, financial services, insurance companies and real estate are very much in demand. That is why Manhattan sees so many more office and residential demand.
Financial service companies have to increase their game because FinTech companies become far more competitive thanks to AI. While the entire Tech industry reduced, financial services were some of the best tenants of AI talents.
In contrast to some other types of technology that have become further, AI is still in the early phases of innovation. This has a direct impact on how technical talent works. In the first half of 2025, technology companies accounted for 17% of the total US office leasing activities, compared to 10% at the end of 2022.
In the city of San Francisco alone, according to CBRE, 1 of all 4 square meters of office space has only been rented out by a AI company in the last 2½ years.
“AI is mostly in office work and are back in the earlier days of technical innovation, where they are in the office five, six days a week and for long hours,” said Yasukochi. “This is certainly the demand for the office space.”
According to the CBRE report, the immigration of talents into these technology markets also has a significant impact on the residential properties, which shows that the residential rent has increased in all Tech tech markets of AI.
The apartment growth from 2021 to 2024 in Manhattan was more than 14%, in DC over 12%, in Seattle over 7%and almost 6%in San Francisco.
Part of this is due to the fact that technical salaries in AI can cover the costs for rents in most of the highest cost markets that CBRE is based on the affordability standard of 30% of the income for apartments.
In Manhattan, where the apartment rents are the highest, the salaries of technology workers are so that employees only pay 29% of their wages in rent. In the San Francisco Bay Area and in DC it is only 19%.
“This idea that AI obviously is the future of technology is that it is only the entry, it is still relatively early – it is another potential tech boom, and this leads to people in cities in which this happens, and that affects the real estate markets,” said Yasukochi.