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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

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you can't be anything blue-collar remotely. As well as jobs like healthcare. Lots of jobs still require you to physically interact with people or things.

All of those jobs should pay MUCH more.

I wonder if that's because you give a lot of value to remote work. It's full of people wanting to go back to the office too and that are really looking for day to day human interaction, so the value is way lower than if we consider the one that people who enjoy remote work give it.

Re: Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says

#182
post #87

We'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.

What are some examples of something more productive? Hobbies and family time?

Why is the question about being more productive? Yes, family time especially is important to me. I only get to spend 18 years or so with each kid; enjoying them, giving them love, and guiding them through/preparing them for life. I want to prioritize that.

Some day, I'll give anything for the chance to have more time with them. Trying to keep that in mind while they are young.

Re: Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says

#183

Alternative title by me: Remote work frees up $800b to be spent more effectively.

On the owner side "Remote work will transfer $800b from someone to anticipated it to someone who didn't as much. Neither will do anything valuable with it anyways." On the renter side "Remote work will allow all the rents to be redistributed to shareholders, who will stack it neatly in piles of virtual $100 bills"

Remote work adds 800b to suburb and small city real estate value.

(Suburb because people not going into office will move further away on avg but also on average want a bigger house to have an office. Small cities from people moving from coastal cities to places like Boise and Austin.)

Re: Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your numbers may be outdated, San francisco is lower than my city coming in around 16 or 17% (i do not have the numbers in front of me atm). The hard problem with % numbers is that they are usually made up on the fly, 62% of the time. However, in my case, I got the CRE vacancy numbers from NAI which is more credible than a random person on HN (no offense)

Those figures are the percentage of office space that is unleased. However, there is a good chunk of office space that is leased by someone yet isn't actually used every day. Usually because the company now does WFH yet can't terminate the lease early. There seem to be a large number of employees who have a desk in an office, yet barely ever use it too. I'm classing any seat that doesn't have an ass on it during the…

But you don’t know those numbers, that is speculation.

Re: Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says

#185
post #34

What amazes me is that we didn't see a faster cratering in value in office space. On any given day in any capital city, perhaps 50% of office desks sit empty. Yet I can't buy an office building for cents on the dollar. Normally when supply far exceeds demand like this, companies owning those assets can't pay their bills, the building is sold, there are no buyers, auction prices crash, the crashing prices cause more c…

Typical business leases were 5-10 years. If you weren't willing to commit to 5 years in 2018, nobody owning a building in a major CBD wanted to see you. You could get sublets from businesses that wanted to recoup costs while moving to a bigger space, or space at the fringes or outside of the CBD. The leases are just starting to run out.

But they didn't all or even near a majority start the lease in 2018.
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