this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
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One of the more honest arguments I have seen about RTO:
The company has rented an important building for operations.
That building is prime real-estate, which is now loosing value, because no one is using it and no one wants to buy it.
Since that can get very expensive, forcing use of the building to keep the investment stable makes sense on paper.
Result: Workers are forced back into office, to everyones detremend. Just because some guys asset is loosing value and now everyone else has to suffer because of it.
It's the kind of short sighted strategy you always see from upper level corporate execs. They make impulse decisions on limited data and justify it with predictions based on old data.
You know, the only kind of data it's possible for them to have at the time of their decision because they refuse to pay for external analysis or external data when they can use their own people and records!
So some jackass sets up a slicer on an excel file assigning an arbitrary value to the asset based on headcount capacity and woudknt you know it? The numbers go down when there are less people there.
Well that answers everything you need to know. Keep people in office, property retains value. Simple stuff really but they will say in their speeches and presentations that they have gone over the numbers and this is the way to go.
Never having considered that they could leverage the square footage in other equitable ways than they already do because, well, that data simply wasn't available.
And it's all bs anyways because real estate value is speculative and determined by the buyer. So when larger business embrace the hybrid or work from home model they give themselves a market advantage and can purchase or lease smaller office space at lower costs than they would have previously so really the only way this grift works is if all they big players keep overpaying for property.
Sooner or later it gets solved by the market whether that want it to be or not. The genie of work from home is already out of the bottle it's just a bunch of "boomer" businesses death gripping and smoking copium as much as they can until they are forced to adapt