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Comment by vhold | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much of it is driven by the company leadership owning very expensive real estate that would lose a lot of value once tech workers are not forced to spend money into those rental or real estate markets.

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I think it's that the companies themselves own expensive real estate, campuses, etc.... not necessarily the leadership.

It's probably, to some degree, a mixture of both. Rarely ever do decision makers not factor their own interests into their decision making process or skew/distort the situation to their advantage in some way so it's not as clearly linked to their self-interest.

Or renting very expensive office space in various cities that have harsh terms for breaking said lease.

As others have said, it is likely the companies themselves owning giant, expensive, heavily-branded campuses that weren't designed with modularity and reselling in mind.

However, making decisions based on this is a pretty classic sunk-cost fallacy. The cost of continuing to use the campus won't be any higher because it's half-empty.

This is why zoning is really bad. Those company could have converted some of those space into housing. Provide it to the employee as benefit for cheap/free. I believe quite significant number of employee would happily live on campus.

One step closer to a company town. And makes the prospect of a job change that much more painful.

Yes, it can be painful but not necessarily have to. Its not like there is no way to mitigate the pain.

How does one mitigate the pain of having to move out of company housing because of a job change?

One way, the company could maybe give some amount of money to help with the moving out cost or maybe allow for the employee to stay for a bit longer while they looking for new place to live.

Still that's a lot of hassle compared to just not having to move, such as from independent housing.

It maybe but independent housing has it downside: commute time and high cost.

Lots of office space is simply not suitable for conversion into living space.

What I mean by conversion including demolishing the office building and building apartment instead not just retrofit existing office building to be a living space.

How is zoning really bad ?

Because they can't just convert some of the space in their campus to housing because of zoning.

The weird thing is that residential prices have gone way up, even in cities. It’s been a great year for the value of Seattle homes (https://www.seattlepi.com/realestate/article/seattle-2021-ho...).

So I don’t think this has to do with executives protecting home values. It might be about the business protecting the value of office buildings, though - if they own them, and don’t rent, anyway.

Isn't that caused by 0 interest rate mostly?

0 interest rate as well as all the stimulus money flowing through the economy. People are looking for places to put their money to not lose out to inflation and most investments reached all time highs already. So investors are looking for pretty much anything to buy - look at crypto (even shitcoins gained tons of value), real estate around the world, etc... in addition to equity markets.

This is an interesting angle I hadn’t considered but I think their net worth is likely pretty diversified. If not then weighted on stocks over real estate.

I'm 95% sure that most of those companies have 5+ year contracts they can't cancel so they will keep trying to force people into the office.

Can't they just sell real estate? I mean, remote working is not a thing for the vast majority of jobs out there, so office space is still a valuable asset. So if you are in IT and have offices that are not going to be used (because your employees want to work from home) then just sell/rent it to other companies in which their employees cannot work from home.

For smaller companies this is likely feasible. But for Apple/Google/etc, I imagine there were a lot of architectural / design decisions that went into their campuses that assumed a single monolithic tenant working in a largely open-office format.

That probably makes those spaces harder to sell/rent. It's unlikely they'll find a single large buyer with the same needs. They'd probably have redesign the campuses a bit to better support multiple tenants.

Those companies have massive amount of plain office space too. Like, Apple has half the office space in Cupertino and plenty more in Sunnyvale. They are certainly not fretting about suddenly having too much spaceship on their hands.

Especially given all large employers will be facing exactly the same issues.

To whom would Apple sell their new spaceship if remote working in tech became pervasive? Who would buy Google’s campus?

I’m pro-remote work, but if all of tech does it, that seriously dents tech-style real estate.

Hey, Amazon's always on the lookout for new fulfillment center real estate!

This just in, "Dear fulfillment center staff, you now have access to free coffee, a gym, and a great cafeteria but will still need to urinate in bottles to meet expectations. If you clock in early you can grab a free coffee! Just think of it as a beautiful environment for you to slave away in, your industry peers will be envious of all the perks you have access to but can never enjoy." --Amazon Logistics Management

To be fair, Apple and Google have tons, tons, and tons of real estate in the Bay Area, not to mention globally. They would probably sell those other non-iconic "basic office buildings" before thinking about selling their main campuses. I mean if you drive through Mountain View and Cupertino, there are entire streets where every building is a Google or Apple building. Plenty for them to sell and still keep their headquarters.

They could but Apple will look pretty dumb spending 5 billion on the spaceship only to sell it a few years later for (presumably) a lot less.

A cult with huge pockets would love the Apple spaceship. Perhaps one could timeshare to multiple cults.

You could convert it into weird housing and make a mint. Rich people would line up to own a condo there.

It’d certainly be an interesting landmark to live in

Who would buy the real estate if everyone works from home?

As I said: not everyone can work from home. IT? Sure.

Residential zones are always in demand. No reason commercial can't be rezoned, and developers are always looking for prime locations.

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