A lot of people with a lot of money at risk got really scared and decided the easiest thing to do was to go back to the status quo.
The owners of commercial real estate are not these people. And it doesn't seem likely that these commercial real estate owners would have sufficient push by themselves to make such a large scale RTO mandate.
That makes as much sense as "people buy iPhones because they own Apple shares in their 401k (it's #2 in the S&P 500) and want to pump the stock". At an individual CEO level it doesn't make sense, for similar reasons. The CEO and the company can reap massive savings from not leasing an office, which is presumably also good for their careers and make the board happy. On the other hand the individual benefit that the CEO can get by ever so slightly increasing demand for CRE is negligible.
And those people own other things too. Sometimes they own commercial real estate directly. Sometimes they're just investing in it. But they all rub elbows with those who do own it. They sit on boards together. They have common interests and let me tell you -- those interests ain't about what's good for you and me.
That said, it shouldn't be the driver of RTO, it should be the need to actually have in-person collaboration.
It's almost as if we should find an economic system that doesn't rely on forced consumption, waste, etc in order to be "prosperous."
The smackdown of this idea is that office spaces have different requirements than living spaces and the conversion of those buildings is too expensive to make it viable. As an unrepentant optimist, I would hope that could be mitigated by supporting those transitions via tax rebates, collaborative zoning and permitting processes, and investing in methodologies that could address the infra needs (plumbing, etc).