Comment by xyzzyz

> - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments

This is something that banks and commercial real estate owners would want, but it is highly unlikely to be motivating the companies actually using the space.

1. If they lease the space, they don’t care about the building values, and in fact would prefer for them to sink so that they can renegotiate leases or move to cheaper buildings.

2. If they own the building, then forcing your own employees into it does relatively little to influence its value, because the value of buildings is determined by the market, ie. the sale prices of similar buildings in similar locations. If buildings around you sell for peanut due to low demand, yours won’t sell for higher just because it’s full. You’d need everyone else to cooperate, and this kind of coordination problem is extremely hard.

3. Even if forcing employees into offices was beneficial from the perspective of real estate values, or at least people responsible for managing real estate inside the companies, the fact of the matter is that these people ultimately don’t have enough pull to enforce such a critical policy change. No CEO in his or her right mind will decide to sign off on return to office mandate based on any real estate value projections. The potential gain here is really trivial relative to changes in employee productivity or increases in turnover.