[tessierashpool]

a) "global pandemic" was _not_ considered a low probability by epidemiologists or by governments. the US set up a pandemic office during the Obama administration for exactly this reason. partly because everybody knew climate change and globalization increased the risk of pandemics, and partly because pandemics tore through Asia and the Middle East in 2002 and 2012.

b) remote work has been making office buildings obsolete for decades now. it is fundamentally absurd to say that you need people to get together in one room in order to build a distributed system. neither office buildings nor the "open plan" spaces inside have made any real logical sense for the tech industry in a very, very long time.

[mulmen]

I agree with you in general but in the context of real estate investment I'm not sure the sudden normalization of WFH and effect on commercial real estate was reasonably predictable.

[cudgy]

From a macro perspective it certainly was predictable given the trends that have been mentioned. From a micro “make as much money from the most suckers now” and “build it and sell it to a REIT” perspective it was able to be ignored.

[mulmen]

Ok so who were the big winners who bet on the pandemic?

[cudgy]

In the example I provided, it would be those that sold their commercial real estate before the pandemic. Other winners would be pharmaceutical companies, residential builders, internet retailers, people that prefer working from home, and families that enjoy each others company to name a few.

However, I was not addressing that.

[mulmen]

Who sold their commercial real estate pre-pandemic? Who is the big winner here that saw the thing everyone else missed?

[tessierashpool]

Obama set up a pandemic preparedness office which coordinated with China. can't call it a huge win, since the other guy dismantled it in 2018, but easy to say there's a person who saw a thing that others missed.

(edit: oops, I said that already. sorry, it's been a week. only just saw this reply.)

the big win with remote work is not selling off commerical real estate but being smart enough not to buy it in the first place. or to found a screensharing and video chat company. so a big winner there is Zoom. and a whole set of winners would be the companies who were already doing remote work and didn't have to skip a beat.

other companies which saw a boost from the pandemic: literally all of e-commerce. every sketchy ad on Instagram selling a $10 product from Alibaba for $50. and the platform they ran on: Shopify. which of course overhired when it saw a huge boom in traffic, and now has had to correct that overhiring.

delayed reply but there are countless examples.