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[Replaced_Texan]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Commercial office r/e has a bleak future. It's costly and largely unnecessary. It was facing a reckoning before the pandemic and now finds itself struggling to articulate a reason for its existence.

It's not going to disappear, of course. There will always be offices of some sort. But it will shrink, considerably. Those who don't need it and are adaptive will embrace work from home culture. Those old farts who couldn't innovate to save their asses (banks, law firms, various stagnant corporations) will hold onto office palaces, but pare their footprints.

No conscientious manager takes on a long term fixed cost he can avoid. If I'm running a consulting firm, or a financial firm, and you offer me the choice between: (1) A lease of a small, flexible area for staff to meet as necessary which compliments their working from home; or, (2) An expensive lease that requires staff to commute to work 9-5 at something they could do as if not more efficiently from home (possibly alienating them or causing them to work for competitors who allow work from home arrangements), which do I choose? Do I even have an option? How am I not compelled to select option 2?

ETA: Retail comm r/e is even more fucked than office comm r/e. On the positive side, however, commercial warehouse space is going to do phenomenally well as the shift to online consumption accelerates. Glory days for big box developers and builders.

I'm thinking about building a home office in the back yard. I've been working out of my dining room for two months now. It's been fine as a temporary thing. But, I'm pretty sure that if we go back, it'll be staggered, few day a week thing or a series of waves where we go back for awhile, come in for awhile. Having a better set up makes sense. Local ordinances allow for the construction of sheds less than 200 sqft without a permit, and it's looking to be a $7-10K build to convert a prefab shed into a cool-ish building that works as an office/studio with electricity/ac. I imagine a lot of the prefab places might get an uptick in business in the coming months.