[Aurornis]

This is a weird conspiracy theory. You'd have to believe that real estate investors were pulling the strings in companies to get them to spend more money with no upside. Like they're just milking these companies for rent and the companies are doing it because they want to give money to the real estate investors?

Even in the rare case where real estate investors are also investors in the startup, my experience is that the startup gets reduced-rate rent as a bonus.

[antoinealb]

That's not what I believe. Other posters have explained it well, but to respond myself:

1. Some large tech companies are also large real estate funds. Google had >100B$ in real estate positions (although mixed between datacenters and office parks) [0]. So its not that they are milked for rent, but more that they would be loosing some money here, although not much. 2. People making decisions are also probably invested in the real estate market, and therefore have money to loose from a collapse of real estate value.

I also gave more thought to it, and I don't see it as impossible that WFH reduces employee's productivity (from the perspective of the employer). However, that is also true of other worker's rights like vacation time or sick leave. RTO mandates are an act of control of workers, from the managing class, and pushing it as "because of productivity" does not change that.

And again: I personally like working more from an office. I don't want to force others to follow my preferences.

[0] https://www.realtygroupfl.com/blog/posts/2022/02/02/google-r...

[alserio]

Not a startup, but real estate investors have a good chunk of shares of the company where I work and they can influence the decision makers just fine

[Aurornis]

I don't doubt what you're saying, but I don't these situations where real estate investors and company investors overlap and also want to micromanage the company's operations are common.

The way this is brought up as a general explanation for RTO across the industry is getting a little silly

[hunterpayne]

Office Real Estate used to be looked at as a very reliable investment. Good return for fixed income and reasonably safe when diversified across geographic locations. So lots of investment houses used REITs for some of their investments, pension funds, investment banks, even those companies that also invest in risky software startups. So you have this idea that there is a person called a "real estate investor", but really the majority of the people who invest money have some stake in office real estate. And those investments got crushed post-COVID. And they are salty about it and blame (probably correctly) remote work. Doesn't matter though, they took the risk and this time it didn't pan out for them so they don't have a real platform to complain. So they do this nonsense and trick a journalist into writing a hit piece.