Commercial real estate owners, pay attention to this telecommuting/coworking trend.
A building is not a very liquid asset. There it is; it isn’t going anywhere. It’s only valuable if someone wants it.
Right now, most Americans have two spaces to spend their time in: their home and their office. When they’re in one place, the other place sits empty.
So, at any given time, roughly speaking, half of the space out there is unoccupied. People are either at work, or at home.
Billions of square feet of office space have been built on this balance. Countless dollars and resources invested in erecting spaces for people to commute to and work inside of.
But what if something changes that balance? What if having a separate place to spend half your day is no longer necessary? There are advantages, of course, to keeping your work and your home lives physically separate. But what if you were in a position to choose where you worked, instead of working in a predetermined spot?
What if even a small percentage of the hundreds-of-millions of white collar workers in America didn’t need to commute to an office anymore? What if it was twenty percent? Fifty percent? Eighty percent?
If I owned a big shiny billion-dollar glass office building, I’d be awfully afraid of that.
- Tony Bacigalupo
One Comment
This is a fantastic piece! It is a huge and serious question. I have friends in the commercial real estate business, and they absolutely do not see it! I’ve brought it up before, but their biz assumptions for the next 5-10 years are basically the same they have been working from for the past 5-10 years. For them, Denial IS a river in Egypt.
It is a Texas-sized elephant standing in the corner…Taking a big shit!
Ouch