As Ardent Cos. Managing Director Mike Guynn strolled around the manicured grounds of his firm's Piedmont Center 1 office building in Atlanta Tuesday morning, the property around him was largely quiet. Before the coronavirus pandemic, the Piedmont Center complex in the city's Buckhead financial district would have been bustling with 8,000 employees from its 225 tenants. But only around 15% of its tenant employees were on campus Tuesday, Guynn said. On a rainy Tuesday morning, most of the outdoor gathering spaces were empty, a few people walked about the hallways and no one was in Arden's indoor lounge. At the start of the year, Guynn was among those who expected corporate America to embrace a full return to the office right after Labor Day. But Guynn said he began to see the writing on the wall a month ago among his tenants, with some planning to delay a return to the office en masse until later this year. “Talking to tenants, it was all related to delta and the unknowns,” he said. 
Tenants across the country have pushed back their office returns from Labor Day to the fourth quarter or even to next year as the delta variant of the coronavirus has brought Covid-19 cases to their highest levels in months. Office owners, managers and the retailers that…  Read the full story here. | 
