[dbsmith83]

> My personal hypothesis is that companies are doing an organized, long term pull out of offices, but are resisting doing it all at once because they'd impact each other's commercial property values. This confusing state we're in is purposeful.

I doubt it, because most companies rent their space and they wouldn't care about the impact to the building. I think your premise is flawed:

> There's always that minor percentage of employees who cannot develop successful patterns to work from home. As the pandemic showed, these folks are the minority today.

Sure, maybe most people can develop 'successful patterns', but that doesn't mean that most people are most productive at home (in the eyes of company heads). The term 'successful patterns' is relative given the situation, and right now that means doing the best we can given the circumstances.

[al_borland]

Most of the stories we here about pushing people back to work are really large companies with pretty significant investments in their campus. They aren't the smaller places that rent a bit of office space. Of course, I assume those leases are long, so they may still be locked in, even if they don't own them.

An empty building, or even a partially filled building, still costs a lot of money to keep. Having that expense when they aren't using it and can't see the value must drive the finance guys nuts. So if the company is paying for a space for an employee in the office, and they are playing for their expenses at home, the cost of that employee's workspace just doubled.

[candiddevmike]

For a lot of companies, they rent from another LLC under the owner's control that owns the building, letting the owner pocket the rent/charge whatever they want for it while building a commercial real estate business.