Interest rates were so low for so long, people tried to find other ways to grow their money.
Hey you want to borrow what is essentially free money to buy a building in charge tenants? It’s a safe investment, right, there’s no reason why businesses would stop needing office space, right,…right right.
And of course it goes deeper than that too. Even if a company doesn’t have any real skin in the game as far as owning The real estate, shutting down the offices makes for some colossal problems. If your stuff’s not already in the cloud you need to migrate everything. It changes secure networks, where do you meet with clients, when you don’t have that huge beautiful branded space with a magnificent mahogany table in your conference room how do you impress your clients? Where do you have your new hardware shipped? Does your IT team now just store hundreds of thousands of dollars of hardware in their house? How much are you going to lose when you auction off all the furniture?
This of course can all be overcome and answered but it’s not easy. It’s also not easily reversible.
Most of management cares a lot less that people are working from home and cares a lot more about having to decommission the actual offices because it’s strategic and financial nightmare fuel.
The company I work for reduced our office space from 3 floors of the building to 1, started leasing out the other two, and now maintains only a few conference rooms for client meetings and similar functions, the server rooms and IT space, and a very small set of communal workspaces for people who want or need to work from the office.
Point being, there’re always options less extreme than “Sell the entire building!”.
We’re in a larger building we don’t own. Keeping one floor for the 5 people a week that come in is kinda insane. We need to move, but it’s a shit sandwich, place is beautiful,
Interest rates were so low for so long, people tried to find other ways to grow their money.
Hey you want to borrow what is essentially free money to buy a building in charge tenants? It’s a safe investment, right, there’s no reason why businesses would stop needing office space, right,…right right.
And of course it goes deeper than that too. Even if a company doesn’t have any real skin in the game as far as owning The real estate, shutting down the offices makes for some colossal problems. If your stuff’s not already in the cloud you need to migrate everything. It changes secure networks, where do you meet with clients, when you don’t have that huge beautiful branded space with a magnificent mahogany table in your conference room how do you impress your clients? Where do you have your new hardware shipped? Does your IT team now just store hundreds of thousands of dollars of hardware in their house? How much are you going to lose when you auction off all the furniture?
This of course can all be overcome and answered but it’s not easy. It’s also not easily reversible.
Most of management cares a lot less that people are working from home and cares a lot more about having to decommission the actual offices because it’s strategic and financial nightmare fuel.
The company I work for reduced our office space from 3 floors of the building to 1, started leasing out the other two, and now maintains only a few conference rooms for client meetings and similar functions, the server rooms and IT space, and a very small set of communal workspaces for people who want or need to work from the office.
Point being, there’re always options less extreme than “Sell the entire building!”.
We’re in a larger building we don’t own. Keeping one floor for the 5 people a week that come in is kinda insane. We need to move, but it’s a shit sandwich, place is beautiful,