"Remote work increases productivity by nearly a trillion dollars for businesses by reducing costly office space overhead costs" Should have been the title.
Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says
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Re: Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says
#42"Value" in this context meaning "prospective source of money".
"Value" in normal context means something like "source of things that people actually want". If people choose not to use something the moment they have that option, then perhaps they never wanted it in the first place.
Re: Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says
#43Costs will be appended to the workers. I hope we all realize someday how working from home applies further wear & tear to our amenities and homes compared to the office's. Think toilets, sinks, fridges, chairs, doors, floors, etc. I fully advocate for WFH regardless and to even supplement with an option like DeskPass for those that want to take a break from home. But a portion of those former office costs should go t…
I work from home and haven't noticed significant additional wear and tear on my toilet. The same with my sink, fridge, doors and floors. I did buy a chair. It was about 300 bucks and it's a better one than I've ever had in an office.
Re: Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says
#44The building i currently live in is a 20+ storey apartment block that was made out of a converted office building built in the 60s. Given the housing prices in [checks notes] cities, it feels like a wave of residentializing is on the horizon.
There was a good odd lots episode interviewing a developer about what it took to convert an office building to residential in nyc.
Youtube link:
You can also search for the podcast.
Re: Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says
#45Many city centers used to be a lot more varied and interesting (and depraved at nights) a few decades back. I guess its possible with falling rents they could become more interesting again.
Yup, a whole lot of our "housing crises" are caused by stupid/greedy cities zoning for more commercial usage than residential and continuing to grow the disparity. If you actually kept them at a fixed ratio you wouldn't generate housing problems. Your commercial space would fill up and then be full, additional jobs wouldn't be added to your city until residential units were and companies would just have to go somewhere else when there wasn't space.
Re: Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says
#46Can you call it value when it's fundamentally rent-seeking? This wasn't value created, it was value extracted.
Re: Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says
#47Costs will be appended to the workers. I hope we all realize someday how working from home applies further wear & tear to our amenities and homes compared to the office's. Think toilets, sinks, fridges, chairs, doors, floors, etc. I fully advocate for WFH regardless and to even supplement with an option like DeskPass for those that want to take a break from home. But a portion of those former office costs should go t…
Uh I’ve already saved more in dry cleaning than it would cost to replace my toilet 10 times.
Re: Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says
#48This is what happens when urban planning goes wrong. In asian cities where most office buildings are zoned along with residential buildings and other types of buildings (shops, service providers etc) the office commercial property would just get converted to another type of commercial and possibly residential property and life moves on. An extreme example of this would be to have residential building type be almost identical to a commercial type which I have seen plenty of in south Asia. The problem in US is that when offices close down the entire city dies. The economic activity halves, it feels empty, creepy and unsafe. A lot of cities in the US exist to cater to the 9-5 office workers that relapse back to suburbs far from the city for anything other than work and some entertainment.
Re: Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says
#49Keep in mind, this is coming from the same firm who told AT&T in the 1980's that mobile phones would be a niche market with only 0.9 million subscribers.[a]
Truth is, no one knows with certainty whether office real-estate losses will be in the hundreds of billions or in the trillions of dollars.
And then, there's the question of indirect, non-real-estate financial losses -- for example, by downtown shops, restaurants, and other establishments that cannot survive if offices remain half-empty for much longer. The indirect, non-real-estate losses may well dwarf the direct ones!
All predictions about losses caused by remote work are little more than educated guesses at this point.
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[a] Sources:
http://www.economist.com/node/246152
https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/in-a-new-book-mckins...
Re: Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says
#50We've become more efficient as a society. We stopped wasting fuel, our time and wear and tear on cars. All that time and material can be spent on something productive.
Instead headlines tell about value of offices. Maybe that value was not real. It only existed because someone with power over employees could force them to waste resources. It's a market failure.