A lot of times, when people discuss the phenomenon of employers ending work-from-home and try to make their employees come back to the office, people say that the motivation is to raise real estate prices.
I don’t follow the logic at all. How would doing this benefit an employer in any way?
Ok I’ll try to explain it. Imagine before if your company had 100 people and they all needed offices so you rent a place that has 100 offices.
Now you switch to work from home and let’s say only 20 people really need office space since the other 80 can just work from home.
Why would you continue to rent the building with 100 offices? You wouldn’t. Instead you find a place with maybe 30 max. And you’re not the only company doing this too.
So now nobody really wants or needs huge office spaces and the people who own these have trouble finding new tenants, demand isn’t very high so they’ll have to lower prices. That’s what people refer to, since the value of these buildings is partially based on the income they can produce. If that goes down then so does the overall value of the building.
It doesn’t hurt the employer unless they themselves just spent A TON of money building their own huge building. Then it would be mostly empty and a huge waste of money so it would look bad.
In addition to that companies make deals with cities for tax breaks based on the number of just they create in each location. Usually there is a rule about how many people need to be working in your offices.
I also heard a city mayor on NPR recently talking about how we need to get workers back down town because the smaller businesses like restaurants are doing poorly in those areas now as well. So I assume they are putting pressure on these companies as well. Instead of finding a new more innovative use for the spaces.