CBRE puts Shanghai office vacancy at 24.4%, yet Hypergryph leased all 37 floors of Xujiahui Vanke Center T1, Shanghai's largest single-building office lease of 2026, at an estimated RMB200 million a year including property management fees, an estimate rather than a disclosed price.
Tags:Shanghai Offices Are 24.4% Empty. Who’s Renting Whole Towers?
An entire 37-storey tower, taken by one gaming company. In a Shanghai office market where CBRE puts vacancy at 24.4%, that is a deal worth a closer look.
The tenant is Hypergryph, and the building is the T1 tower in Phase III of Xujiahui Vanke Center. According to 21st Century Business Herald, it is Shanghai’s largest single-building office lease of 2026. But the headline deal tells only part of the story.
One tenant. A whole tower.
The property has a total gross floor area of approximately 90,000 square metres. A third-party calculation based on market conditions puts the annual rent, including property management fees, at about RMB200 million.
That figure is an estimate, not a disclosed contract price. The distinction matters: a long-term deal for a whole building is negotiated differently from a company renting half a floor.
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Nor was this a quick decision. Shen Yin, Colliers’ managing director for East China, said the transaction took a year to follow through. Seven or eight months went into studying the tenant’s requirements, followed by comparisons between multiple projects before a final choice was made.
For a deal on this scale, the cheapest rent was not the deciding factor. Shen said rent carried relatively limited weight compared with the wider considerations behind the company’s choice.
Who is taking the space?
The report describes a change in who is driving Shanghai’s office market. Domestic companies taking space for their own operations are becoming more important, while the earlier model of foreign funds buying properties as investments has receded.
Technology, media and telecommunications businesses accounted for 32.7% of leasing activity in the report’s sector breakdown. Alongside trade and manufacturing, finance and professional services, they formed four groups responsible for more than 80% of leasing activity.
CBRE’s separate analysis found that new company establishments and expansions made up 38% of demand, remaining elevated for a second consecutive quarter. Robotics, AI, gaming and digital-content businesses feature prominently in the report’s account of that demand.
Xuhui’s riverside area has been a preferred location for technology tenants. The attraction goes beyond an address: companies are weighing access to talent, employees’ journeys to work, and connections with suppliers and other businesses.
Cushman & Wakefield’s Shaun Brodie linked the search for better offices to intense competition for gaming, AI and digital-content talent. In those industries, he said, a high-quality workplace has become part of attracting and retaining staff.
Some companies are buying instead
Hypergryph is not the only company upgrading its Shanghai base. The report says Pinduoduo bought Building 4, also known as T5, at Jingyao Hongqiao for RMB1.3 billion. In late 2025, Lalamove spent approximately RMB1 billion on the T6 building at the same development for its East China headquarters.
A full tower comes with a catch
For a landlord, one tenant can fill a huge amount of space at once. It also concentrates risk: if that company’s business runs into trouble, the impact can reach the whole building. For the tenant, an independent tower offers less flexibility when its space needs grow or shrink.
Meanwhile, the wider market still faces pressure. Brodie expected roughly 520,000 square metres of new supply in the fourth quarter. Older buildings with weaker facilities face a different challenge, with upgrades or conversion into hotels and long-term rental apartments among the options discussed.
So a tower-sized deal does not mean every landlord can raise the rent. As Shen cautioned, smaller leases for individual floors or half-floors provide a better guide to everyday rental conditions. One gaming company can fill a tower; that does not fill the rest of Shanghai’s empty offices.
Source: 21st Century Business Herald
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