this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
277 points (95.4% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36167 readers
1011 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

A lot of times, when people discuss the phenomenon of employers ending work-from-home and try to make their employees come back to the office, people say that the motivation is to raise real estate prices.

I don't follow the logic at all. How would doing this benefit an employer in any way?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I see, so the idea is that they're responding to external pressure from governments and financial institutions? I guess I could see that, though it shouldn't be hard to prove by pointing to specific policies and loan conditions.

But also, some of these companies own those buildings. If they’re not in use, their value in the market drops.

How does that work? Why would a buyer care if the seller was using the building? If anything, I would think using them would depreciate their value due to wear and tear.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If nobody is using any buildings then there's an indefinety supply and no demand.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Buying something to create artificial demand usually isn't a good investment strategy. A "pump-and-dump" can work if you can set off a buying frenzy and sell before it wears off, but it's not a long-term strategy.

Besides, if that was the plan, leaving the buildings vacant would be just as effective as using them.

[–] PaupersSerenade 17 points 1 year ago

I'm speaking from experience in CA;

Quite a few of these markets were moved on pre pandemic. Now it's a question of how to offload. My prior company had a very nice multi story building in SoCal before they tried calling back. That was before covid, even then they had trouble securing a purchaser or renter. The market has only gotten worse.

There's some sunk-cost fallacy; where you've already paid for the space, if you make the whole team drive 1hr+ to meet it'll have been worth it.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

isn’t a good investment strategy...

long-term

It's CEOs doing this, they don't necessarily have to make things work out long-term as long as it doesn't look like they messed up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Some years ago the average tenure of a CEO was 18 months and it's probably not changed that much since, so they really have no reason to worry about what's going to happen in a 5+ year horizon: they will be long gone, bonus in the pocket and stock options fully vested and cashed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What about modern business makes you think they have a long term strategy? All of them have been making only short term gain decisions for a while now.

Who cares if the company could be more successful in the future if I can make a lot now by sending it into bankruptcy today?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A big thing in my country, business buildings are expensive because of location and what's around them. But if employees aren't in the office, restaurants, cafes public transport corner shops etc lower in demand or even close entirely. This makes the building itself less in demand and harder to rent out at a higher price.

A lot of these buildings are owned by banks, CEO's and financial institutions who have the money to push for changes like government to make people come into office and can use any reason like "think of all the failing cafes!".

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah, hm... I guess that makes sense. Bringing people to the office raises the value of surrounding retail, which in turn raises the value of the office. Thanks, that explanation clears it up.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Don't forget if the company outright owns the building, any market price drop negatively affect there books, in asset/net worth section.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

WFH makes it so there isn't a buyer or very few interested.

So if you want to shift the property, you're going to have a bad time.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

A buyer is only interested if they have a use for the building. If work from home becomes the default way, then who would need to buy an office building?