5 ms·

> It’s an early but telling sign of the broader distress brewing in the commercial real estate market, which is hurting from the twin punches of high interest r

> It’s an early but telling sign of the broader distress brewing in the commercial real estate market, which is hurting from the twin punches of high interest rates, which make it harder to refinance loans, and low occupancy rates for office buildings — an outcome of the pandemic. And that's what I think is behind much of the push for RTO. While a lot (if not most) office space is rented, corporate executives are the kind of people who could have a lot of money invested in commercial real estate. They see this large threat to their portfolios, so they're trying to keep their assets from depreciating.

api 2y ago
Real estate infuriates me to the point that I find myself hoping it burns to the ground and that the whole industry suffers. “Real estate always goes up” is treated like a damn entitlement to the point that the financial well being of everyone under 40 today has been sacrificed to it. In 2008 it felt like the entire real economy was put on the chopping block to bail it out. I’d love for a real estate market that looks like Japan. That way the real economy built around people actually doing things could flourish free from endless real estate idle rent extraction.
- lwansbrough 2y ago
  Agreed. The de-risking of the housing market has been disastrous for <= millennials. The de-risking has come in the form of artificial scarcity caused by zoning gatekeeping and outdated fire code, amongst other things. It’s time North America took a hard look at the root causes and fixes them before there is a crisis of confidence in leadership (which is already happened to me - I’m moving out instead of buying in to the insanity.)
  - nordsieck 2y ago
    None of that would be a problem if people could just build. We need to double the number of bedrooms in most major cities.
    - tzs 2y ago
      There aren't enough people in most major cities to come anywhere occupying that many bedrooms. Are there enough people in rural areas, suburbs, and minor cities that want to move to major cities to supply renters for them?
      - nordsieck 2y ago
        > There aren't enough people in most major cities to come anywhere occupying that many bedrooms. Right now. But that's because it's too expensive to live there, so people move to outlying areas. But if the cost of housing starts to drop, people will start moving in, which will stymie the cost declines. I'll admit that I'm not intimately familiar with all of the large cities in the US, but Seattle would be a slam dunk. The suburbs are way more populace than the city itself. Same with San Francisco, although that city has more problems than just a shortage of housing. I'm not sure to classify New York City, but Manhattan could easily double its bedrooms with no shortage of demand.
        majormajor 2y ago
        You ain't gonna make it cheap, exactly, in those places. Look at Manhattan compared to Seattle - there's ALREADY far more dense housing in NYC than Seattle, yet prices stay high. People will be willing to pay more for those places with more amenities. That will continue. But you're gonna make it a lot more livable and arrest the rate of inflation.
        nordsieck 2y ago
        It may never be cheap, but it should be possible to drive down the cost of housing to the cost of construction. A big part of getting lots of building done is to take a chainsaw to existing regulation. * No minimum lot size * No parking space requirements * No single family zoning in the city - minimum is multi-family, 15 stories. * No requirement to match the character of the neighborhood * No height based additional setbacks * No rent control * Get rid of the anti-dorm laws[1] * No historical preservation without the city buying the property in question * No building plan for the city - replace it with a "shall issue" policy where the city has to have some affirmative reason to block the permit or it gets issued by default. There's probably a bunch more that should probably be done away with; those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. --- 1. It's very common in cities to ban dwellings that house more than x (typically 4) un-related adults.
  - charlie0 2y ago
    Voting with your feet is the most practical option.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      I don't know of anywhere that I can move to in Canada that has the zoning rules I want and also a hospital. I'm not sure I could even find a place sans hospital. I think that means I have to vote with my ballot, not my feet.
      - j7ake 2y ago
        Calgary, Edmonton.
      - inhumantsar 2y ago
        what zoning rules do you want?
    - jjav 2y ago
      I know it's not what seems like the most fun solution but there is merit in this. For anyone in their 20s or 30s.. you only have so many years even if it seems life is long. If your current city makes it impossible to have the housing you want you have two choices. Try to change it, which is noble but can take many decades. Or move. I can't fault anyone for trying to change it since improvement is a great cause. But do you want to find yourself 60 years old, still waiting for those changes? I'm on the younger side of GenX so not in my 20s anymore. But when I was in my 20s I wanted to desperately live in my chosen city (Manhattan). I tried everything but it was way too expensive to reasonably rent, forget buying. I gave up and moved and bought a nice house for less money than a closet in Manhattan.
      - yunwal 2y ago
        There are really really good reasons why certain places are expensive vs. cheap. Having no access to walkable areas, fresh food, education, safe water, or public amenities in general is not a dignified way to live for most people. It's not about fun, it's about your health, community, support system. Changing that situation in cheaper areas is not necessarily going to be easier than changing housing affordability.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - bcrosby95 2y ago
    It really started with Greenspan's juicing the markets in the early '00s due to the dotcom bust and 9/11. We got a short reprieve after the 2008 crash. But the markets have been fucked up for a while now. Arguably the '08 crash was bad long term too. As far as I've read, a lot of people got out of the industry after that, which made it even harder to build.
    - highcountess 2y ago
      He was juicing the real estate market before the aughts, and he was even warned before the aughts. There are clear indications and evidence that he did that with designs.
      - Zafira 2y ago
        I think the general consensus is that Greenspan was an ideologist and effectively a useless Fed chair since he didn’t believe in regulation. The only reason he was probably not ousted was because he had enablers with the added leverage that the economy was doing pretty well during his tenure.
  - rickydroll 2y ago
    > The de-risking of the housing market has been disastrous for not(1%class) fify, the problems are class-based, not age/generation-based. the intergenerational conflict is fed by the 1% to keep us from paying attention to how they are robbing us.
    - brewdad 2y ago
      It's both. The class of younger generations who can afford to be homeowners is much smaller than it was when previous generations were that age. Sure, it was never easy for most 30 year olds to buy a home but now a 30 year old has had to have a LOT of things swing their way to even consider it.
    - wyre 2y ago
      I don’t mind this narrative and you’re true in most areas, but home ownership is so tightly correlated with generation OP’s comment in not incorrect. At every age baby boomers were more likely to own a home than millennials at the same age. https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synopses/2023/07/28/generational-gaps-in-income-and-homeownership https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synops...
- bamboozled 2y ago
  I realized the other day, and I might've been in denial about it, but I cannot return to my home city as it's just too expensive now. Even if I wanted too I simply couldn't afford it without introducing quite immense financial stress into my life. In some way I hope it crashes as well, just so I can get back in if I wanted too, but on the other hand, so many of my friends and family have bought into the "real estate always goes up" mantra that if it goes backwards, they will be ruined financially. With interest rates up and their mortgage repayments going up dramatically, I've already seen more divorce than I ever imagined I'd see. The financial pressure just broke marriages. In hindsight, I'm probably better off now that I moved away to a cheaper place in the mountains and leave nearly debt free. I invest my money rather than give it back to the bank with interest.
- majormajor 2y ago
  > “Real estate always goes up” is treated like a damn entitlement to the point that the financial well being of everyone under 40 today has been sacrificed to it. In 2008 it felt like the entire real economy was put on the chopping block to bail it out. Real estate took a bath in 2008. So much that it scared developers and investors so much that they slowed building to ridiculous paces If you want reasonable housing prices in the US you need either: - to change demand so people want to leave today's dense and expensive cities and stop competing-up the prices. The "RTO is all about commercial real-estate" true-beleivers think remote work alone could do this, but the last few years aren't providing strong evidence of that. Density and geography have other appeals. - or, some way to re-start massive construction in those in-demand areas to push rents and individual-unit pricing down... but in this case, the price of the real land would actually go way up (there's no development if there's no future value > present value)
- freitzkriesler2 2y ago
  Hear hear. It's time for a teddy Roosevelt figure to come along and gut real estate investors.
  - mtalantikite 2y ago
    I mean, Bernie was pretty close until the machine behind the Democrats worked as hard as they could to force Biden. They almost took Bernie off the ballot here in New York when it was clear Biden was getting the nomination.
  - petre 2y ago
    The US no longer has politicians like Teddy Roosevelt anywhere in sight.
jjav 2y ago
> corporate executives are the kind of people who could have a lot of money invested in commercial real estate Sure, many of them do. But there's something else they are far more invested in: their company (through huge pay and even larger stock option grants). I don't buy this meme that CxOs are willing to hurt company efficiency just to protect personal real estate investments, when for nearly all executive (I'm sure there's some exception but not enough to matter) they own far more share in the company than in their side business in real estate.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  Agreed. But, companies are owned primarily by funds that in turn are exposed. If there is some pressuring to save real estate, it’s not the C suite, it’s the stockholding giants
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    I think this doesn't get enough attention. The biggest shareholders in many companies are index funds like Vanguard and BlackRock, which often have the right to vote on behalf of the shares in their ETFs. Their interests are in ensuring the entire ETF goes up, and a real estate deleveraging would do the opposite.
    - phkahler 2y ago
      >> Their interests are in ensuring the entire ETF goes up... Things like automatic enrolment in 401K plans, or automatically bumping employee contributions by 1 percent will also benefit the broad market and funds.
      - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        Yes, as does curing COVID and protecting the environment.[1] And on the less good side: broad-based price hikes instead of fighting with the competition over market share in a race to the bottom.[2] It remains to be seen whether ETF ownership is connected to "greedflation", but I believe so. [1] https://newsletterhunt.com/emails/12216 https://newsletterhunt.com/emails/12216 [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2632024 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2632024
anon291 2y ago
What I don't think people realize is that, in general, the people that stand the most to lose from these kinds of things are not banks. Banks typically hold assets for others, not in their own right. By far, the biggest investor in real estate is government pension funds. Government has every vested interest to enforce RTO, because without it, if companies stop leasing space, then government pension funds will be unable to pay out. All too often people assume 'greedy bankers' are the ones who are going to lose. That's wrong. Bankers are the middle men. Bankers don't care. They'll get their cut.
- brailsafe 2y ago
  Isn't a lot of that tied up in residential real estate investment trusts though, which offer the much more perverse incentive of pushing rents as high as they'll go, to the point of increasing homelessness?
  - anon291 2y ago
    It's tied up in both. Pension funds were severely underfunded, and unlike a 401k, they're defined benefit. Money was promised decades ago and now it's time to pay up, but they're not at where they need to be to make payments. Thus... there's no other option. Government has had to seek out incredibly dangerous investments. The largest purchaser of hedge funds, venture cap, etc... is pension funds. People claim evil capitalists are driving greed in expected return. To the contrary. The government is demanding high rates of return, and enterpreneurs and capitalists are providing a supply. Then, when things go wrong as they inevitably will, because you can't beat the market's valuations, everyone points fingers. But the demand for the high rate of return is primarily driven by government pension funds. Without them, a more modest rate of return would be demanded, and companies like BlackRock, Vanguard, etc, wouldn't be incentivized to purchase commercial or residential real estate in those amounts.
_sys49152 2y ago
all those 'we are all in this together' billboards you saw posted up in 2020 wasnt for the frontline workers or cashiers.
- level1ten 2y ago
  Why would frontline workers need further encouragement after their 12 hour shifts when they were already being rewarded in the form of window displays [1] and gift cards [2] to Chipotle and Bed Bath & Beyond? [1] https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-news/monuments-hotels-lighting-up-coronavirus-solidarity https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-news/monuments-hotel... [2] https://newsroom.chipotle.com/2021-04-27-Chipotle-Invites-Fans-To-Thank-Healthcare-Professionals,-Pledges-250,000-Free-Burritos https://newsroom.chipotle.com/2021-04-27-Chipotle-Invites-Fa...
jdlshore 2y ago
I’ve seen this conspiracy theory so many times, and it just doesn’t hold water for me. Let’s see some actual evidence, not baseless speculation.
sirspacey 2y ago
Having spoken with over 100 CXOs and founders on this, this is never the issue. If you invest in corporate real estate you do it through a liquid vehicle, not owning the actual contracts. The push to RTO boils down to: - leaders want the over-committed. Remote doesn’t feel like that. - they miss working in person as a team and the fuel it provides for getting things done. Remote doesn’t feel like that. It is almost universally a gut-sense that has driven the effort. I think it does make sense for the leadership team and their close team members to work in person most of the time. But there’s a funny flip side to this - almost all of them are on the road most of the time. Coming back to an empty office sucks. I’ve been building remote-first companies my whole career. I prefer frequent onsites to offices. But in the end, the prestige of the office, social cohesion of organizing life around it, and personal sense of power from having a team around you are unlikely to be replaced by any alternative for most leaders.

api 2y ago

Real estate infuriates me to the point that I find myself hoping it burns to the ground and that the whole industry suffers. “Real estate always goes up” is treated like a damn entitlement to the point that the financial well being of everyone under 40 today has been sacrificed to it. In 2008 it felt like the entire real economy was put on the chopping block to bail it out. I’d love for a real estate market that looks like Japan. That way the real economy built around people actually doing things could flourish free from endless real estate idle rent extraction.

lwansbrough 2y ago
Agreed. The de-risking of the housing market has been disastrous for <= millennials. The de-risking has come in the form of artificial scarcity caused by zoning gatekeeping and outdated fire code, amongst other things. It’s time North America took a hard look at the root causes and fixes them before there is a crisis of confidence in leadership (which is already happened to me - I’m moving out instead of buying in to the insanity.)
- nordsieck 2y ago
  None of that would be a problem if people could just build. We need to double the number of bedrooms in most major cities.
  - tzs 2y ago
    There aren't enough people in most major cities to come anywhere occupying that many bedrooms. Are there enough people in rural areas, suburbs, and minor cities that want to move to major cities to supply renters for them?
    - nordsieck 2y ago
      > There aren't enough people in most major cities to come anywhere occupying that many bedrooms. Right now. But that's because it's too expensive to live there, so people move to outlying areas. But if the cost of housing starts to drop, people will start moving in, which will stymie the cost declines. I'll admit that I'm not intimately familiar with all of the large cities in the US, but Seattle would be a slam dunk. The suburbs are way more populace than the city itself. Same with San Francisco, although that city has more problems than just a shortage of housing. I'm not sure to classify New York City, but Manhattan could easily double its bedrooms with no shortage of demand.
      - majormajor 2y ago
        You ain't gonna make it cheap, exactly, in those places. Look at Manhattan compared to Seattle - there's ALREADY far more dense housing in NYC than Seattle, yet prices stay high. People will be willing to pay more for those places with more amenities. That will continue. But you're gonna make it a lot more livable and arrest the rate of inflation.
        nordsieck 2y ago
        It may never be cheap, but it should be possible to drive down the cost of housing to the cost of construction. A big part of getting lots of building done is to take a chainsaw to existing regulation. * No minimum lot size * No parking space requirements * No single family zoning in the city - minimum is multi-family, 15 stories. * No requirement to match the character of the neighborhood * No height based additional setbacks * No rent control * Get rid of the anti-dorm laws[1] * No historical preservation without the city buying the property in question * No building plan for the city - replace it with a "shall issue" policy where the city has to have some affirmative reason to block the permit or it gets issued by default. There's probably a bunch more that should probably be done away with; those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. --- 1. It's very common in cities to ban dwellings that house more than x (typically 4) un-related adults.
- charlie0 2y ago
  Voting with your feet is the most practical option.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    I don't know of anywhere that I can move to in Canada that has the zoning rules I want and also a hospital. I'm not sure I could even find a place sans hospital. I think that means I have to vote with my ballot, not my feet.
    - j7ake 2y ago
      Calgary, Edmonton.
    - inhumantsar 2y ago
      what zoning rules do you want?
  - jjav 2y ago
    I know it's not what seems like the most fun solution but there is merit in this. For anyone in their 20s or 30s.. you only have so many years even if it seems life is long. If your current city makes it impossible to have the housing you want you have two choices. Try to change it, which is noble but can take many decades. Or move. I can't fault anyone for trying to change it since improvement is a great cause. But do you want to find yourself 60 years old, still waiting for those changes? I'm on the younger side of GenX so not in my 20s anymore. But when I was in my 20s I wanted to desperately live in my chosen city (Manhattan). I tried everything but it was way too expensive to reasonably rent, forget buying. I gave up and moved and bought a nice house for less money than a closet in Manhattan.
    - yunwal 2y ago
      There are really really good reasons why certain places are expensive vs. cheap. Having no access to walkable areas, fresh food, education, safe water, or public amenities in general is not a dignified way to live for most people. It's not about fun, it's about your health, community, support system. Changing that situation in cheaper areas is not necessarily going to be easier than changing housing affordability.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bcrosby95 2y ago
  It really started with Greenspan's juicing the markets in the early '00s due to the dotcom bust and 9/11. We got a short reprieve after the 2008 crash. But the markets have been fucked up for a while now. Arguably the '08 crash was bad long term too. As far as I've read, a lot of people got out of the industry after that, which made it even harder to build.
  - highcountess 2y ago
    He was juicing the real estate market before the aughts, and he was even warned before the aughts. There are clear indications and evidence that he did that with designs.
    - Zafira 2y ago
      I think the general consensus is that Greenspan was an ideologist and effectively a useless Fed chair since he didn’t believe in regulation. The only reason he was probably not ousted was because he had enablers with the added leverage that the economy was doing pretty well during his tenure.
- rickydroll 2y ago
  > The de-risking of the housing market has been disastrous for not(1%class) fify, the problems are class-based, not age/generation-based. the intergenerational conflict is fed by the 1% to keep us from paying attention to how they are robbing us.
  - brewdad 2y ago
    It's both. The class of younger generations who can afford to be homeowners is much smaller than it was when previous generations were that age. Sure, it was never easy for most 30 year olds to buy a home but now a 30 year old has had to have a LOT of things swing their way to even consider it.
  - wyre 2y ago
    I don’t mind this narrative and you’re true in most areas, but home ownership is so tightly correlated with generation OP’s comment in not incorrect. At every age baby boomers were more likely to own a home than millennials at the same age. https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synopses/2023/07/28/generational-gaps-in-income-and-homeownership https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synops...
bamboozled 2y ago
I realized the other day, and I might've been in denial about it, but I cannot return to my home city as it's just too expensive now. Even if I wanted too I simply couldn't afford it without introducing quite immense financial stress into my life. In some way I hope it crashes as well, just so I can get back in if I wanted too, but on the other hand, so many of my friends and family have bought into the "real estate always goes up" mantra that if it goes backwards, they will be ruined financially. With interest rates up and their mortgage repayments going up dramatically, I've already seen more divorce than I ever imagined I'd see. The financial pressure just broke marriages. In hindsight, I'm probably better off now that I moved away to a cheaper place in the mountains and leave nearly debt free. I invest my money rather than give it back to the bank with interest.
majormajor 2y ago
> “Real estate always goes up” is treated like a damn entitlement to the point that the financial well being of everyone under 40 today has been sacrificed to it. In 2008 it felt like the entire real economy was put on the chopping block to bail it out. Real estate took a bath in 2008. So much that it scared developers and investors so much that they slowed building to ridiculous paces If you want reasonable housing prices in the US you need either: - to change demand so people want to leave today's dense and expensive cities and stop competing-up the prices. The "RTO is all about commercial real-estate" true-beleivers think remote work alone could do this, but the last few years aren't providing strong evidence of that. Density and geography have other appeals. - or, some way to re-start massive construction in those in-demand areas to push rents and individual-unit pricing down... but in this case, the price of the real land would actually go way up (there's no development if there's no future value > present value)
freitzkriesler2 2y ago
Hear hear. It's time for a teddy Roosevelt figure to come along and gut real estate investors.
- mtalantikite 2y ago
  I mean, Bernie was pretty close until the machine behind the Democrats worked as hard as they could to force Biden. They almost took Bernie off the ballot here in New York when it was clear Biden was getting the nomination.
- petre 2y ago
  The US no longer has politicians like Teddy Roosevelt anywhere in sight.

jjav 2y ago

> corporate executives are the kind of people who could have a lot of money invested in commercial real estate Sure, many of them do. But there's something else they are far more invested in: their company (through huge pay and even larger stock option grants). I don't buy this meme that CxOs are willing to hurt company efficiency just to protect personal real estate investments, when for nearly all executive (I'm sure there's some exception but not enough to matter) they own far more share in the company than in their side business in real estate.

jncfhnb 2y ago
Agreed. But, companies are owned primarily by funds that in turn are exposed. If there is some pressuring to save real estate, it’s not the C suite, it’s the stockholding giants
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  I think this doesn't get enough attention. The biggest shareholders in many companies are index funds like Vanguard and BlackRock, which often have the right to vote on behalf of the shares in their ETFs. Their interests are in ensuring the entire ETF goes up, and a real estate deleveraging would do the opposite.
  - phkahler 2y ago
    >> Their interests are in ensuring the entire ETF goes up... Things like automatic enrolment in 401K plans, or automatically bumping employee contributions by 1 percent will also benefit the broad market and funds.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      Yes, as does curing COVID and protecting the environment.[1] And on the less good side: broad-based price hikes instead of fighting with the competition over market share in a race to the bottom.[2] It remains to be seen whether ETF ownership is connected to "greedflation", but I believe so. [1] https://newsletterhunt.com/emails/12216 https://newsletterhunt.com/emails/12216 [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2632024 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2632024

anon291 2y ago

What I don't think people realize is that, in general, the people that stand the most to lose from these kinds of things are not banks. Banks typically hold assets for others, not in their own right. By far, the biggest investor in real estate is government pension funds. Government has every vested interest to enforce RTO, because without it, if companies stop leasing space, then government pension funds will be unable to pay out. All too often people assume 'greedy bankers' are the ones who are going to lose. That's wrong. Bankers are the middle men. Bankers don't care. They'll get their cut.

brailsafe 2y ago
Isn't a lot of that tied up in residential real estate investment trusts though, which offer the much more perverse incentive of pushing rents as high as they'll go, to the point of increasing homelessness?
- anon291 2y ago
  It's tied up in both. Pension funds were severely underfunded, and unlike a 401k, they're defined benefit. Money was promised decades ago and now it's time to pay up, but they're not at where they need to be to make payments. Thus... there's no other option. Government has had to seek out incredibly dangerous investments. The largest purchaser of hedge funds, venture cap, etc... is pension funds. People claim evil capitalists are driving greed in expected return. To the contrary. The government is demanding high rates of return, and enterpreneurs and capitalists are providing a supply. Then, when things go wrong as they inevitably will, because you can't beat the market's valuations, everyone points fingers. But the demand for the high rate of return is primarily driven by government pension funds. Without them, a more modest rate of return would be demanded, and companies like BlackRock, Vanguard, etc, wouldn't be incentivized to purchase commercial or residential real estate in those amounts.

_sys49152 2y ago

all those 'we are all in this together' billboards you saw posted up in 2020 wasnt for the frontline workers or cashiers.

level1ten 2y ago
Why would frontline workers need further encouragement after their 12 hour shifts when they were already being rewarded in the form of window displays [1] and gift cards [2] to Chipotle and Bed Bath & Beyond? [1] https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-news/monuments-hotels-lighting-up-coronavirus-solidarity https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-news/monuments-hotel... [2] https://newsroom.chipotle.com/2021-04-27-Chipotle-Invites-Fans-To-Thank-Healthcare-Professionals,-Pledges-250,000-Free-Burritos https://newsroom.chipotle.com/2021-04-27-Chipotle-Invites-Fa...

jdlshore 2y ago

I’ve seen this conspiracy theory so many times, and it just doesn’t hold water for me. Let’s see some actual evidence, not baseless speculation.

sirspacey 2y ago

Having spoken with over 100 CXOs and founders on this, this is never the issue. If you invest in corporate real estate you do it through a liquid vehicle, not owning the actual contracts. The push to RTO boils down to: - leaders want the over-committed. Remote doesn’t feel like that. - they miss working in person as a team and the fuel it provides for getting things done. Remote doesn’t feel like that. It is almost universally a gut-sense that has driven the effort. I think it does make sense for the leadership team and their close team members to work in person most of the time. But there’s a funny flip side to this - almost all of them are on the road most of the time. Coming back to an empty office sucks. I’ve been building remote-first companies my whole career. I prefer frequent onsites to offices. But in the end, the prestige of the office, social cohesion of organizing life around it, and personal sense of power from having a team around you are unlikely to be replaced by any alternative for most leaders.