White-collar workers temporarily enjoyed unprecedented power during the pandemic to decide where and how they worked.
No this isn’t right. It’s cheaper to have an empty building than a full one so companies who own their buildings would still make more money letting their employees work from home.
Also, even if it was true, no company is going to try to solve a problem like that. Companies are selfish. They’d rather everyone else go back to work to boost the value of commercial real estate while they continue to work from home to increase their profits everywhere.
The only reason companies are forcing people back is because upper management simply prefers that work environment. They like to sit in their corner office, surrounded by their peons. A sense of power.
Or, they have the kind of personality where they thrive surrounded by people and can’t understand how anyone could be productive at home, data be damned.
It has nothing to do with real estate.
I 100% agree there are people in management who just like to have a sense of power over people, but there are big corporations losing money over real-estate.
For starters, if you’re a firm who owns a lot of rental office space, you’re losing money on the businesses not renewing their license (which I’m not saying this is a bad thing).
Then, you have the huge corporate business who have a huge amount of office space which they own. A company in my city JUST finished a $250-million expansion onto their HQ right as COVID hit. That same land area is in a central location and was even being highly considered for high density housing before the company bought the land. The parking lot for the new building never gets more than half full. Fuck 'em.
