More than 245,000 square feet of commercial office space is sitting empty across Kingston and Montego Bay, according to Jamaica Sotheby’s International Realty co-founder and CEO Julian Dixon. She is bringing to all concerned that the large-format inventory built for the business process outsourcing sector is running above normal levels.

The vacant space spans Half-Way Tree Road, Mona Road, Grenada Way and Saxthorpe Avenue in Kingston, along with Fairfield Road and Market Street in Montego Bay. 

Among the properties Dixon cited is a six-storey building on Half Way Tree Road marketed as ideal for BPO tenants, offered in blocks of either 30,000 square feet across three floors or 43,000 square feet across four.

Dixon said the volume of large-format space currently on the market is slightly above what the sector has typically carried, a shift she linked to the ongoing contraction in outsourcing employment. The properties in question were largely purpose-built during the sector’s expansion years, when call centre and business support operators were signing long leases on large floor plates in both cities.

The vacancy figures add a property-market dimension to a decline already visible in employment data. The Global Services Association of Jamaica has previously reported that BPO sector employment fell from roughly 60,000 workers to about 40,000 over a two-year period. Industry watchers have also pointed to the rollout of AI-driven customer service tools, including Digicel’s “Ruby” system, as a factor reshaping demand for voice-based outsourcing work [context from prior coverage, not confirmed in this specific report.

Dixon did not attribute the vacancies directly to either factor, but the timing lines up with a sector that has been shedding call centre jobs while employers experiment with automated alternatives to live agents. Large-format office space designed around dense floor plans for phone and chat operations is generally harder to re-let to other tenants, since few other industries need the same combination of open floor plates, backup power and telecom infrastructure.

No separate data release from the Real Estate Board of Jamaica accompanied Dixon’s observations. What is clear is both the Government and the BPO regulatory agencies failed to compile adequate data on the sector. They left it practically a data desert, and that has come back to bite them. 

The scale of the vacancy, more than a quarter-million square feet concentrated in two cities, marks one of the more concrete signals yet that the BPO slowdown is beginning to show up in commercial property values rather than just employment statistics.

Less than ten years ago, the BPO sector was hailed as the saviour of the Jamaican economy. The Development Bank of Jamaica (DBJ) turned its nose up at the productive sector and other industries looking for capital for their enterprises, choosing to focus exclusively on   BPOs. How wrong they were.

 AI, high operating costs and a lack of productivity have made it unviable. It was said you could get a better return on a BPO than on a hotel, and investors rushed in to mine gold from these boxes, even legendary sprinter Usain Bolt.

Yoni Epstein, who heads up itel makes the point that other BPO provinces like Costa Rica are more competitive and puts Jamaica’s productivity in the shade in that area. Jamaica is battling  its higher operational costs.

There was a time when the BPO sector contributed J$136 billion annually to the Jamaican economy and employed over 60,000. It accounted for 6 per cent of Jamaica’s GDP; now those numbers are falling, and some anticipate that Jamaica may lose around a further 15,000 jobs over the next three years.