Nobody predicted this except pretty much everybody who thought about what the long-term effects of COVID would be on commercial real estate around mid-2020 or so.
IDK, it seems like only a subset of people could have predicted it. People who think remote work isn't good wouldn't have predicted it. People who thought it was good might think it was just accelerating the inevitable.
I'd guess there are still a lot of people who think returning to office life is inevitable. There's certainly a big push for it from a certain subgroup now.
Within about a day of “two weeks to flatten the curve” a large amount of people predicted exactly what was about to happen to the entire country because they understood economics. If you pointed any these things out, routine accusations of wanting people to die were thrown your way.
Something similar to this would have happened without COVID. SF was in massive oversupply, London is in massive oversupply, all these cities had massive growth in supply fuelled by debt (CRE is probably one of the biggest benefactors of low rates, Blackstone Real Estate was basically finished in 2008, they were doing huge deals at the top of the market...move-forward ten years, fastest growth area of the business, the guy who led the division in 2008 is now second in line to run the firm).
COVID definitely took the edge off but you are seeing the same thing in residential (particularly people moving into single-family) and it isn't of the same magnitude.
This isn't unusual (NY had a similar downturn in the late 80s, you don't even need to go back far) but it was multiple things at once. COVID is a very easy get out for people who did extremely stupid things with other people's money.
I'd guess there are still a lot of people who think returning to office life is inevitable. There's certainly a big push for it from a certain subgroup now.