Most businesses don't own their office space afaik, so why would a business care about protecting real estate values? If anything, wouldn't the majority of businesses prefer to see a decline in real estate values as that would lead to a decrease in rent?
This rationale makes no sense to me. Forcing the totality of all employee interactions to a device owned and controlled by the company seems to provide a more complete monitoring solution than any in-person monitoring could provide.
The point is that work from home doesn’t ruin some real estate investment scheme. It reduces their expenditures, in the same way that they don’t have to buy cubicles.
But that cost is miniscule, they would prefer to pay it to get the (perceived) productivity and monitoring benefits.
The average cost is $37.64 per square foot and ~250 sq per employee (you don’t just pay for cubicles) it adds to ~9.5k / employee per year which is far from insignificant.
Worse it’s dangerous as layoffs don’t instantly end leases and downturns are terrible times to try and sublease office space.
10k on an employee whose total cost is at least 120k is not insane at all. Computer equipment is ~5k (also for the same reason). Not to mention support staff like IT (guess why).
Some places have higher salaries but also higher rent. Manhattan for example averages 81$/square foot.