Do you all believe or have a take on the future of remote work in real estate? Specifically development and acquisition? I have a friend at Lockheed Martin in corporate finance and even after the pandemic, he will be going into the office once a week with fridays off. Just sounds like unreal flexibility and work life balance. Do you believe development and acquisition could go remote?
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This is a good question and one that I have given a lot of thought to this week.
As background, I am in development with a small firm. The development team never stopped going into the office during the pandemic, while the back office team (administration, accounting, etc.) was sent home. I have been fairly convinced to date that it isn't feasible to be productive from home in development. I have too many calls, I need to coordinate and collaborate with too many people, I need to print off site plans, construction plans and schematics, and the list goes on. This is very difficult to do from a distance.
Fast forward to this week, I have been very, very sick - so I ended up working from home for the first time since the pandemic. My productivity (despite being sick) was better than expected. There are still many things that are extremely difficult, including all of the items I listed above. However, I've also noticed that a lot of fill time has been cut down or cut out. Meaning there's less socialization, non-productive discussions, stupid questions, and etc. that come my way. This is all to say, I'm less certain than I once was that these positions can't be done remotely.
With all of that said, real estate - for better or worse - is an old industry. We do not like change and we do not adapt to change quickly. As an example, look at the technology in the industry and at most of these firms. I do not see the business positions being able to work remotely in the near term, but am perhaps more open to this changing on a go forward basis. I certainly do not think real estate will lead the way, but it will have to (be forced to) adapt as we are always competing for human capital with other industries. If this becomes normalized in other industries, that's a huge benefit that talent will consider when making decisions and real estate will have to change to compete.
I'm bullish on outer suburbia. A ninety-minute commute each way is intolerable five days a week, but not bad two days a week.
I do wonder about the back office work...if it can be done fully remotely, then it can be done in Uruguay or the Philippines. Even if there's a bit of a loss of quality or efficiency, the cost savings could more than make up for it.
I'm really hoping so...I'm a little more than 2 years in and am just losing it living in a major metro having to sit inside and stare at a screen all day, just can't see myself doing this over the long term. Praying that I can find a fully remote AM role or something and generally be able to structure my time how I would like to; I think this is inevitable once teams realize people will take a pay cut to live where they want and work on a schedule they want so long as productivity doesn't take a major hit.
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