Is office as an asset class dead?
With all this new Covid stuff are these old guys at the big office owner operators finally going to admit that office is dead and remote work is the future? Also I wonder if they will at least not make their workers go into the office every day…curious to hear thoughts
I see office paralleling what has happened to retail. Give or take here and there.
Ask the CEO's of all the tech companies still gobbling up office space all over the US....
“Gobbling up” is a contender for the all time corniest phrase
Is this my sign to invest in WeWork?
I heard they're losing less money than they were before. Seems like a very sound investment!!
Yeah maybe a few tech companies with a couple leases but 74% of Fortune 500 company CEOs said they will reduce office space in June 2021, might be 90% now I bet
Yup. Using tech companies activity to make a remark about the health of office as a whole can be dangerous. Also, there’s more to office than buildings like One Vanderbilt. need to examine how a potential fallout of Class B , C office will shift the markets. Not every office investment firm or office developer is SL Green or Vornado.
Where is my comment on the health of office as a whole? Clearly there are going to be downsides and struggles. He asked if it’s dead. No, it’s not. Using one’s own desire to work from home as an indicator that a multi billion dollar industry is dead is also dangerous.
Damn your company's office portfolio must be hurting real bad
Some random WSO user saying they want to work from home is dangerous?
Dangerous to who? Your office portfolio?
If a comment like "I want to work from home" is dangerous to you, should you really be investing in it?
Yeah duh. Trying to actually get a bonus this year you selfish fucks. If I lose out on my Porsche so you guys can work from home three days a week......
Similar to retail. The premier properties continue to do well while the average to below average properties suffer.
Lol read the question. “Is office dead”?. No, as long as tech companies are taking up tons of space at high rents it’s not. Question doesn’t say “how will class b and c office buildings be performing in 10 years”.
Probably the most accurate take. I think that most people will go back, but a not insignificant chunk never will. Of those who go back I feel there will be a decrease in square feet per head and more people hot desking and coming in 2-3 days a week.
Flexible arrangements work well and they’re cheaper. They also open up the talent pool, if you’re a F500 in Columbus you can get talent from SF or NYC and if you’re in Podunk with high speed internet you can work for a firm in any major or minor city.
much of the B/C office mkt has been dead for years..
Not sure if you guys saw this but bill gates thinks that in the next 2-3 years we will have 3D virtual meeting lol
https://vrscout.com/news/bill-gates-most-work-meetings-will-happen-in-t…
Having played around with an Oculus recently, I would say that it's not quite there yet...but it will get there. I can absolutely imagine virtual conference room meetings being common in a few years.
Fuck that sounds so lame
They will never admit it, just like how all the office leasing brokers wont admit it either. While the product type is not dead, I keep hearing the same delusional arguments office investors/brokers have over and over and it makes no sense to have this massive comeback.
Owners of office haven’t even felt the brunt of the move towards WFH or reduction in office space yet as leases for the most part haven’t burnt off, being on average 7-10 years long. Sublease vacancy in most markets is going crazy and landlords are still getting paid…for now.
Sure, mega cap tech and professional services firms are taking space, but what about everyone else? I have talked with countless small to medium sized business owners who are never going back to the office, and guess where the money they would have spent on office goes? Right back into their pockets.
And honestly, who actually wants to be in an office 5 days a week? Your telling me the optionality of WFH and being able to reduce office size and save money is bad for business?
Totally agree. Unfortunately, a good portion of us probably want to go buy-side at a GP or LP, who most likely will want people in the office 5 days a week.
Lower level employees paying $1,800+/month for 500sf studios are going to get sick of WFH and wish they had an office to go to.
Unless they move?
No… they’re going to ask why they have to work in a 500 sq ft studio for $1800/month paying a 8% marginal state income tax rate when they could do the same job from a 1500 sqft house for $1000/month paying a 0% marginal state income tax rate
This idea that employees disgruntled with paying high rents / low quality of life will want to go back into the office, which is more expensive and leads to a lower quality of life, makes absolutely no sense.
Ugh.. Here i am again, commenting on another "is the office dead?" thread where the opinions are either "it's dead forever" or "it will come back roaring".
Both opinions are nonsense and like many things, the actual outcome is somewhere in the middle of the two. It's not that crazy of an idea but the idea that your future REPE buy-side gig will be fine with you sitting at home on your couch is insanity. Face time and in office tutelage is a necessity of any high brow industry, especially real estate, whether that's apparent or not. Doesn't mean you have to be in your seat every day of the week either.
What's most insane about the remote only debate is the idea that young people can just drift away to random areas of the country with low COL to plug away on their laptops. It seems to make some sense for eccentric engineer or creative types (a trend before pandemic) but very little for most yuppies. I just visited a friend who relocated out west and it was dystopian. Beautiful place, don't get me wrong, but not a realistic existence, at least not for me.
I fully embrace flexibility and the privileges it offers but believe there are severely negative long term implications to a remote world where people are angrier and more divisive than ever. If you don't feel this way then consider yourself lucky.
That's just my piece and to be clear, I am an office broker in NYC. Business has been satisfactory, there's demand for good space and omicron has been a blip on the radar thus far. The city will live on!
Office as a whole is no doubt in a decline. But there are still crazy amounts of money to be made in office in certain markets / product types
Fish out of water!
I’ll be the odd one - I like working in an office, and I feel like I’ve lost a ton by being at home the last two years. My productivity is great, but a lot of the osmosis learning and culture is gone - for those of you whose teams sucked, I get it, but my teams have always had good rapports. Our office was always open but not mandatory, and I took advantage of it regularly throughout 2020.
Now that said, I do NOT want to go back to pre-pandemic style office facetime, but a 3+2 hybrid with long weekends and where I leave around 5 or 6 and finish up at home would be ideal. All anecdotal, but it’s a sentiment that’s I’ve heard echoed when talking to friends and colleagues who are similarly at career inflection points from junior to mid-level / management roles. Our execs polled the full firm and it was the most senior who were the biggest proponents of WFH - the seniors already made their money and networks and are happy to be semi-retired… I’m still trying to build a career.
Assuming (egotistically) that at least a decent number of people agree with me, I think there’s always going to be a need for a place where we all congregate to work, so we’ll always have an office.
I neither want nor expect a return to 2019 office occupancy, so totally expect market rents to remain depressed as tenants downsize and optimize their square footage. I’d hate to be bagholding a leveraged Class B office rn, but I don’t think it’s anything near dead
Agree. For folks looking to get into the "bottom of the top", facetime is crucial to brownnose those at the top
But what's the point of you going in if your seniors are not there? I don't disagree that this used to be the right framework for upwardly mobile mid-level folks, but that doesn't mean human behavior can't change.
Strategy follows structure. If we live in a mostly WFH world where 90% of the work is getting done remotely, seniors will figure out a way to adapt their evaluation of more junior employees.
Maybe you got by with slow/shoddy work product before, because you were a likable chap to hang with in the office. But maybe WFH exposes more clearly who is objectively good at getting the work done and have the correct skills - and focus will shift away from soft factors like display of charisma and political deftness around the office.
Also, people will be able to judge how efficient you are with Zoom meetings and how well you communicate over email/phone calls, with focus shifting away from ability to capture moments of serendipity like an elevator run-in with your CEO or ability to command a physical board room.
The WFH era will demand new skills out of employees and for companies to come up with new sets of performance measurement tools, but that doesn't mean it is inherently inferior to how things were done before. Office space isn't some inherently necessary condition for human achievement - ask Aristotle or Newton or Fermat. It also doesn't necessarily follow that we will end up in some dystopian state where people are super-isolated and there is no connection. It just means that we will structure our days and social networks differently to get the most out of life in a different regime that doesn't involve spending 10 hours a day commuting and being in the office.
I think the idea that soft skills will be usurped by hard/technical skills is fantasy. If anything, without an opportunity to practice your soft skills everyday, people on average will be worse at communicating, public speaking, small talk, commanding a room, etc. Those who have soft skills will be more valuable. Almost anyone in the world can go through a public education system and come out an engineer, computer scientist, etcetc. How many can build trust with a stranger?
I think you are misguided in thinking that work quality is the sole (or even biggest) predictor of upward movement in the career ladder. The ability to make the transition from being an expense to a revenue line item on the company's books is the biggest hurdle (or choice) that everyone has to make at some point.
Realistically, the effects of WFH won't really materialize until the people that are aged 30-40 right now become business owners/operators. We'll see what choices and decisions they decide to make in 20-30 years when structuring their organizations.
No, the office as an asset class wont die. Certain subsets of offices might die, aka low quality in shit locations but high quality offices in good locations will stay. Most employers have an incentive of keeping the employees in the office as they have a higher productivity in the office (also Real estate costs are also only a fraction of costs for most big firms) but how we use the office is gonna change to basically convince employees to go back: open plan offices (no cubicles anymore), hot desking, cafés, gyms (like for example at GS Londons office) and other amenities aimed at making the office more attractive. It will also be more collaboration-based (more meeting rooms). I think in the future most employees will have a hybrid setting (a couple of days in the office and a couple at home), which will probably lead to a decline of office space used but not the death of the asset class.
After 9/11... high rises are dead (office and apt/condo), no more development above 3 floors
After 08 GFC.... homeownership is dead, millennials (and by proxy gen z) will never buy houses again
Even the whole "retail is dead" one is a lot more nuanced than people ever admit (when making casual statements at least).
There is a lot office product fast approaching "functionally obsolescent", this was an issue before the 'rona but likely accelerated, this is the area to watch for (both in problems for portfolios and opportunities for developers/investors).
Curious on what you mean by functionally obsolescent
I mean office buildings that cannot accommodate the floor plan/configurations tenants want today. This is becoming an issue with buildings built in the 80s and older. It can also be related to issues with energy efficiency (that can really be physical deterioration of sorts, but some cannot be solved regardless of capex intensity), but is more like inadequate parking, elevators, and lack of common space amenities. Some floor plates are also too large to be used the way tenants want with open plans (based on larger cubicles and high utilization of private offices, with file rooms/libraries and such in the centers).
Frankly there are many office buildings that probably need to be torn down and rebuilt to regain full value, but that is not a cheap process.
To be fair, the first two are individual events with a short term effect, not long term trends. 9/11 didn't involve some fundamental technological/social change which would have killed the high rise as an asset.
But you can certainly make an argument that COVID has massively accelerated a change which was already underway. The concept of working in a cubicle from 9-5, five days a week was already dying well before the onset of the pandemic. Coworking and flex working were already a thing, so tastes in what offices looked/felt like, and the utilization of space by companies, was already moving away from the traditional 50 story full block building on Sixth Ave, or the suburban office park. Employers realizing that WFH and virtual meetings didn't do much to dent productivity might encourage a faster shift to full time remote working, but fundamental changes to the office have been grinding along for a while now which will help make remote working more permanent, in a way that the GFC or 9/11 didn't coincide with, or exacerbate, an underlying societal change.
Ozymandia I don't know your age, background, or when you entered the industry... but calling 9/11 and the 08-GFC as "individual events with a short term effect" and suggesting, by proxy, that covid-19 stands in a different class of black swan impacts is something I'd say most people would disagree with who experienced all three of these "events". 9/11 and 08-GFC shook the globe and changed all sorts of long term trends, covid-19 is the "next" one of these we are experiencing now.
You make valid points on cubicles, work trends, etc. But my main point in this is that in these periods of chaos, lots of predictions get made that turn out to be 180 degrees wrong. There are many more "bad" predictions in the post 9/11 or 08-GFC world I could add (many around the end of travel and excess), but the point is the same, it's very easy to overestimate the long-term impacts of major black swan events.
Exactly these responses aren’t thinking out 5-7 years ahead when Covid is just a blip. People tend we have short memories. Enjoy your 5 day workweek from zoom while us office folk crush it at the office getting face time and have in person interaction with our colleagues.
Dead? No. Changing? Yes. Similar to retail (in advance, I work in retail/multifamily, not office).
There is going to be a right-sizing of the office market. We will never go 100% WFH for revenue-generating roles, and I'd bet a lot of money on that. The face to face and relationships are too important, that's something I realized as someone who was adamant when we first went to WFH that it was the way of the future. There's also something to be said for the mental health benefits of seeing your coworkers and grabbing lunch a couple times a week.
My thought is that most firms will annex back office functions to either satellite offices or WFH (likely offered as flexible/employees' choice), while front office will have at least 3 days a week in the head/regional head office, and the rest of the week WFH. This will result in downsizing for a lot of companies, or at least maintaining office space without aggressively increasing it (unless it's a rapidly growing firm opening satellite offices - see tech). Class B and C office properties will continue to suffer and many will be repurposed. Class A office will continue to be a hot commodity long-term.
100% agree with this.
Couldn't agree more with a post. Seen it first hand at my firm with BO and some of MO are all WFH but FO expected to come in at least 3 times a week (all in AM). I can see BO and MO completely being remote and FO 3-5 days in office. I'm not really in this camp but I find many of the senior's seem to hate those in BO too so I guess it'll help the work dynamics too in the office but who knows.
BO was getting replaced by AI in 10 years anyway, so...
WFH sounds great and all, but I think it has some serious downsides long-term. If most US companies stay with a predominately WFH schedule, I'll bet the house you'll see a massive rise in depression and suicides. Humans were built to live in community together. If you lose one of the largest contributions to your social life, you will see harmful ramifications.
Add in that most people don't go out as much anymore and live online and you've got a bad combination.
WeWork?
Speak for yourself broski. Humans were not meant to spend the majority of their waking hours in an artificially lit windowless office staring at screens all day. I've never felt more depressed than having to come back to the office full time. The total loss of freedom and lack of sunlight is more destructive than WFH will ever be. It seems like those who like the office are the same people who rely on it for their social life. I seek community outside of work with people I actually choose to be with.
Being required to go into an office also gives another party control over your time. I'd rather be paid solely on my production.
Yup. Huge misconception from folks with a large portion of their identity invested in where they work and who they work with, that no office means no social life... These folks really need to get friends outside of the office, get a hobby, travel, and call their families more often - instead of trying to ruin it for people who'd rather not be sitting in a cubicle and are perfectly productive at home.
As compared to spending an even greater number of their day in an artificially lit windowless home staring at a screen all day?
Ha! You say that now, until someone decides you aren't as productive at home, and then you'll be screaming about how unfair it all is.
Live in a HCOL city. From what I see and hear in my city, younger folks only dislike WFH cause they have roommates + their place is tiny. They want to get out more. But I see that as more of a personal issue, rather than a fundamental issues that affects the critical mass.
Yeah exactly! I don't have any friends at my office- but there are quite a lot of people there who would like to undermine me in front of my clients and then take over my deals once they've gotten me fired
I can't comprehend how someone wouldn't go crazy if those were their only social interactions
Bro your office doesn’t have windows?
Trophy office is doing great, look at recent prints on some recent deals, spreads on some buildings inside pre-pandemic levels. Anything in tertiary markets (suburban) will likely struggle, but definitely not going to die. Then you have everything else in between, recently renovated, good location, LEED gold star, etc., it will have tenants. Not renovated since the 80's and not near metro... well, you might have some stressors. Painting with a broad brush here, but I believe that's the gist. I've seen a few papers that say days in the office will decrease, but sq. foot / employee is increasing with flexible workspaces and more open office layouts. Don't know where the balance is between the two, but office is far from dead.
Guys - what is the future though? I think a lot of people in real estate might think in present terms about office in terms of hybrid schedule. But are we all really going to go back to the office in a few more years, ten more years, 20 years? Sure hybrid could be a next step but it’s really just a stepping stone to the ultimate wfh remote goal line. I personally believe that remote work will be the future. Think about it, if most of us experienced office work and believe in hybrid work, what about the younger kids out of college who never experienced the office culture before? Will they really care about preserving hybrid or just want to go full remote?How many times are we going to be on Instagram watching our friends in Mykonos, Tulum or Costa Rica to realize how shitty office life is. How will firms recruit younger gen z talent or the generation below that? They will need to offer flexible working solutions. This will drive firms to compete with each other by offering more perks like this. I think B and C office is done and I don’t think trophy A office will even continue to do well since every firm will eventually go remote. And even if people lease that space for small spaces, it won’t nearly be the rents that those office firms/investors underwrote. I foresee all office firms tanking and going into the red unless they severely cut staff, diversify to other asset classes, and hire new senior management who can scale a different asset class. If not, well I hope you’re not at one of these firms. This may take a few years once these leases burn off for us to really see the side effects but the writing is clearly on the wall. If you’re too hard headed to think that then I don’t know what else to say. Office will be extinct so might as well start conversions now.
Office won't die...
By saying "office will die" is basically saying the thousands of office towers will be obsolete. This simply cannot happen.
What office space brings is different is unique versus remote work. When you work in an office environment, you're on average more productive, you get ideas shared across your co-workers, the information transfer is faster & efficient. There are groups of people in every company that depend on being in an office environment to be productive and then there are those who can work as well from home. Does this mean the guy working from home is superior? No. they're just different.
The reason why people think office is dead is because the large supply of office space in the market. Companies built alot more office towers than required. This then pushes the lower quality office space into submission.
Therefore, the office asset class will realize that ~~
a) Great buildings in strong locations will thrive even throughout COVID-19. Want proof? Here, The 200 Bay St Office tower is going to be sold for over asking... they're selling it for over $1.1B and it took under 2 months to have it go "Under Contract". This happened back in October 2021.
b) The not-so-good quality office towers will experience lower occupancies and problems.
Again, the issue is more so to do with oversupply than the entire asset class being dead.
Probably some pressure on the margin but offices are not going away, its certainly not a dead asset class.
WFH is really on the margin and mostly for the highest end white collar worker. Hybrids could become some more of the norm for some companies but people will still be working in offices for years/decades to come.
Idk, we’ve been fighting for office space all over the U.S. constantly at my firm. I handle real estate for a large IB (corp dev). Having trouble finding space.
Office was out of favor pre-COVID too. Poor NCF characteristics on a risk-adjusted basis. Also, in your Porters Five Forces Analysis RE: Power of Customers, it is arguably the weakest in all of CRE. Literally the top tenants being chased by institutional developers and investors (tech) can buy your whole building and it is an immaterial expense to them. Now sprinkle on WFH with most forecasters predicting a 30% drop in demand.
If I were to pick an office I would be interested in buying, I'd say I'm more bullish on buildings occupied by elite professional services (bankers, lawyers, PE) in gateway cities versus tech. Those professionals differentiated themselves to earn big paychecks with willingness to work very long hours, compared to tech where they were differentiated with their brain and engineering education. The office acts as a natural cap on hours for the professional services folks by virtue of the fact that they have to go home. When this cap went away during COVID it was a huge drain on all their mental health (national news stories on this, have several friends to anecdotally confirm). I think firm execs realize this and will be embracing coming back to the office for partially this reason. Couple that with the fact that the higher up ones do actually need facetime for generating new business which is another source of space demand from these types of tenants.
Just my worthless 2c as an armchair commercial landlord.
Basically this. I have heard similar from a lot of people as well as clients venturing to the offices to discuss personal matters on their cases/portfolios. The building we share right now consists of financial services professionals as well as law firms. They have paid parking for their customers (right outside the building), and they are constantly being used.
I think the growing consensus is that the gap between winners and losers in office will widen. Class A++ office in interesting locations will attract companies willing and able to pay top. This is because now that everybody wants to work from home, if a company wants to draw employees to the office it has to be the shiniest office around. All other levels of quality will suffer as they are further commoditized by decreased demand.
Something to keep in mind is that we have yet to go through a real recession in the WFH-capable era. The 2008 crash happened before Dropbox, Zoom, ubiquitous smartphones, ubiquitous high-speed internet, etc. WFH was much less practical in 2008 than it is now.
I don’t count the recent COVID recession because it was too fast, too weird, and disproportionately hurt small retailers. At some point, we’re going to have a more “normal” downturn in which there’s serious financial pressure on white collar firms to reduce overhead costs. That’s something that hasn’t really happened since mass WFH became feasible. When it does happen, we’ll see the full impact of these technologies for the first time.
Just speaking about the NYC market here:
Like many have been saying, there has been a flight to higher quality office product. However, this does not mean that Class "A" office is not facing issues, but it's certainly not "dead". The older vintage stuff with outdated mechanical systems and/or functional obsolescence with respect to layout/configuration is really struggling and there are questions of continued viability. I know of a larger, pre-war building in the Garment District area where significant a majority of the tenants are not honoring their rent obligations. Without major renovations and/or repurposing, the continued viability of some of these buildings is questionable
I think there are a lot of class A office buildings where tenants are in arrears and not paying or prolonging payment. Wouldn't be surprised if most office owner operators track this daily if not weekly. Sure people still like class A office but are tenants really gonna keep paying and they won't hit the rents that they underwrite in their quarterly valuations once these leases burn off. Also for new class A development, unless they have a strong anchor tenant in place they won't continue to keep hitting top rents and the developments might even stall or not happen. I doubt anyone can really fundraise for new class A development now in the capital markets looking for equity. The new development underwriting models will get crushed once they don't hit their high rents with those optimistic rent curves. This delay on office development will really limit new supply —> office may not be extinct but on endangered species list in my mind
We might be overlooking that some firms may not want to take on the legal liability of returning to the office in case there are outbreaks of Covid and employees vaccination status
B or C office outside of major metropolitan area without heavy amenity packages will likely suffer and fair share be converted - whether that be life science or other. Deman will likely grow for class A amenity rich assets. Speaking Boston specifically but I guess it applies to the "sexy 6".
You know what you have to do. Scape that office building for brand spanking new Industrial property. Your time is over old man.
It is a realignment. Specific assets will significantly increase in value and many others will lose value. There will always be a need for offfice space. You will just see companies that needed 300K sqft now need 175K and will move up the chain to nicer spaces that have more benefits for their teams. In this move we will see companies paying more psf while spending less overall. The class D and C offices will be retrofit to other use cases. This is normal for physical space, has happened many times before.
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