Re:Work from home and the office real estate apocalypse
by xkgt on Sunday June 05, 2022 @12:48AM
(#31628107)
It will be interesting to observe what this means for growth of cities. In the last 100 years, city sizes increased while staying within Marchetti's travel time budget [1] (1 hour for round trip) thanks to higher speeds available through motorized transport. Now that technology is redefining proximity once again, I wonder what factors will continue to encourage/discourage people to live in dense cities.
1 - http://www.cesaremarchetti.org/archive/scan/MARCHETTI-052.pd...
Re:Work from home and the office real estate apocalypse
by koshnaranek on Sunday June 05, 2022 @10:20AM
(#31631215)
If we look at the most extreme case where everybody had an office or at least a desk and then everybody moves to homeoffice 100% then it massively decreases then demand for property in general. Everybody already has a home. Even if more people buy bigger homes then or rent a personal office, lots of former office space will be converted for other uses.
I think this is due to the perceived value of proximity not keeping up with technology. The "real" value of proximity fell as technology improved, and that was exposed during the pandemic. It's more of a correction than outright destruction, but it's not wrong that the overall asset class lost value.