I wonder how much of it is driven by the company leadership owning very expensive real estate that would lose a lot of value once tech workers are not forced to spend money into those rental or real estate markets.
It's probably, to some degree, a mixture of both. Rarely ever do decision makers not factor their own interests into their decision making process or skew/distort the situation to their advantage in some way so it's not as clearly linked to their self-interest.
As others have said, it is likely the companies themselves owning giant, expensive, heavily-branded campuses that weren't designed with modularity and reselling in mind.
However, making decisions based on this is a pretty classic sunk-cost fallacy. The cost of continuing to use the campus won't be any higher because it's half-empty.
This is why zoning is really bad. Those company could have converted some of those space into housing. Provide it to the employee as benefit for cheap/free. I believe quite significant number of employee would happily live on campus.
One way, the company could maybe give some amount of money to help with the moving out cost or maybe allow for the employee to stay for a bit longer while they looking for new place to live.
What I mean by conversion including demolishing the office building and building apartment instead not just retrofit existing office building to be a living space.
So I don’t think this has to do with executives protecting home values. It might be about the business protecting the value of office buildings, though - if they own them, and don’t rent, anyway.
0 interest rate as well as all the stimulus money flowing through the economy. People are looking for places to put their money to not lose out to inflation and most investments reached all time highs already. So investors are looking for pretty much anything to buy - look at crypto (even shitcoins gained tons of value), real estate around the world, etc... in addition to equity markets.
This is an interesting angle I hadn’t considered but I think their net worth is likely pretty diversified. If not then weighted on stocks over real estate.
Can't they just sell real estate? I mean, remote working is not a thing for the vast majority of jobs out there, so office space is still a valuable asset. So if you are in IT and have offices that are not going to be used (because your employees want to work from home) then just sell/rent it to other companies in which their employees cannot work from home.
For smaller companies this is likely feasible. But for Apple/Google/etc, I imagine there were a lot of architectural / design decisions that went into their campuses that assumed a single monolithic tenant working in a largely open-office format.
That probably makes those spaces harder to sell/rent. It's unlikely they'll find a single large buyer with the same needs. They'd probably have redesign the campuses a bit to better support multiple tenants.
Those companies have massive amount of plain office space too. Like, Apple has half the office space in Cupertino and plenty more in Sunnyvale. They are certainly not fretting about suddenly having too much spaceship on their hands.
This just in, "Dear fulfillment center staff, you now have access to free coffee, a gym, and a great cafeteria but will still need to urinate in bottles to meet expectations. If you clock in early you can grab a free coffee! Just think of it as a beautiful environment for you to slave away in, your industry peers will be envious of all the perks you have access to but can never enjoy." --Amazon Logistics Management
To be fair, Apple and Google have tons, tons, and tons of real estate in the Bay Area, not to mention globally. They would probably sell those other non-iconic "basic office buildings" before thinking about selling their main campuses. I mean if you drive through Mountain View and Cupertino, there are entire streets where every building is a Google or Apple building. Plenty for them to sell and still keep their headquarters.
