I'd look at remote now, as before the pandemic, it was about 5% of corporate America was a hundred percent remote. And now we're talking about it doubling or tripling, which is 10 or 15%. However, the next cohort, the next 50% are not going to be going in five days a week. They're going to be going in some variation of that. Four days a week, three days a week, two days a week. And then the other time there'll be working remotely, I think that's going to be embedded into the commercial real estate world. https://www.solvecast.com/articles/detail/26189-impact-of-remote-work-on-real-estate-with-jonathan-miller-president-ceo-miller-samuel-inc

The one thing though that you're going to see right now is that many cities have an optics problem where, the cable news, TV pans across time square, and they see all the boarded up retail. Well that's because 80% of the office towers are empty. And will not be empty in the next six months. And that will breathe life back in, but it's going to be at lower rates and a different type of tenant that will be coming in https://www.solvecast.com/articles/detail/26189-impact-of-remote-work-on-real-estate-with-jonathan-miller-president-ceo-miller-samuel-inc

I think there was a quick reset in pricing in both retail and commercial and residential as a result of COVID. And it's not clear, we're still over the next few years going to figure out, how human behavior is ultimately going to respond. I mean, right now we're at peak Zoom, it's a hundred percent, is that we're not a hundred percent, but we're dominating, people working remotely dialing in, et cetera. That is not going to be the norm nor will the way it was pre COVID be the norm. It's somewhere in between. And I think, human beings have to figure it out. And I think that's going to take the next couple of years. https://www.solvecast.com/articles/detail/26189-impact-of-remote-work-on-real-estate-with-jonathan-miller-president-ceo-miller-samuel-inc

I think collaboration doesn't work on zoom. I, and maybe it will, maybe there's a way to do that, but at least as a stance right now, just this isn't a scientific fact, but my own experiences when I hire new staff, It is almost impossible to really train them because they're not immersed. https://www.solvecast.com/articles/detail/26189-impact-of-remote-work-on-real-estate-with-jonathan-miller-president-ceo-miller-samuel-inc

It's less about COVID and it's more about the plunge in mortgage rates nationwide or worldwide, but nationwide that has caused this massive demand for housing, but at the same time, lenders are not morally flexible as we would think of them during the housing bubble where credit conditions are actually about 20% tighter than longterm norms. So as we go through this housing boom we're not looking at a banking crisis at the end of it. https://www.solvecast.com/articles/detail/26189-impact-of-remote-work-on-real-estate-with-jonathan-miller-president-ceo-miller-samuel-inc

And so there is a really good fed study, a few about a year or less than a year ago, the Cleveland fed that talked about. This urban outbound activity and and found that the decline in our, the increase in migration numbers wasn't. Wasn't solely big from people leaving. It really was people not coming into the city because of fear of our safety, for health reasons that there was a sort of label attached to urban markets that high density means high chance of infection and, in New York one thing I've been saying since the early days of a lockdown was, the infection rates in New York Manhattan saw the highest outbound migration, the sort of narrative in air quotes, fleeing the city . But what's missing has been inbound migration because of the fear of safety. And, this is what I'm calling a V-shape recovery, which is B for vaccine. The increase in the vaccine is expanding the inbound migration at the city, which makes net bound, net migration, less negative. And that's been the half of the equation that's been missing across the country. https://www.solvecast.com/articles/detail/26189-impact-of-remote-work-on-real-estate-with-jonathan-miller-president-ceo-miller-samuel-inc