This is a very popular idea, but it doesn’t make a huge amount of _sense_. Most office-oriented employers don’t own much if any real estate; they lease it. And unless they’re really huge, what _they_ do has very little influence on the price of real estate generally; they’ve no individual incentive here. Arguably a mild counter—incentive; it’s generally to their benefit, as renters of real estate, if future real-estate costs drop.

Now, of course, you could argue that it’s pension funds and things exerting control via ownership, but again, this is a bit of a stretch; it’d require a lot of coordination, and there’s no evidence it’s happening. And this would only be a real possibility, at most, for active funds; index funds can’t really threaten to sell a company’s stock if it doesn’t do what they want. And, if this was a thing, you’d expect that the Shadowy Fund Conspiracy would have made more of an effort to save _retail_, whose bleeding out over the last few decades has been a constant problem for commercial real estate.

(Also, in most cases, it’s mostly _different funds_; even within a single fund provider, the fund that owns lots of commercial real estate and the fund that owns lots of tech company are generally different funds, with different fund managers, designed for people with different risk profiles. This would make the sort of coordination imagined here even more fraught.)

I get why people like this idea; it’s a just-so story. But it’s very hard to see how it would work.

I suspect companies are pushing for this because their leaderships genuinely believe it is good for productivity, though as far as I can see there’s an absence of hard evidence. (I personally strongly dislike working from home, and got back to an office as soon as it was allowed, but the idea that it hurts productivity doesn’t gel with what I’ve seen, at all.)