There's some ugly reality settling in for the office real estate market, if researchers from the NYU Stern School of Business and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business are correct.

In their recent paper, Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse, Arpit Gupta, Vrinda Mittal, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh argue that the work-from-home shift since the pandemic has caused significant changes in "lease revenues, office occupancy, lease renewal rates, lease durations, and market rents."

"We find a 32% decline in office values in 2020 and 28% in the longer-run, the latter representing a $500 billion value destruction," they wrote. "Higher quality office buildings were somewhat buffered against these trends due to a flight to quality, while lower quality office buildings see much more dramatic swings. These valuation changes have repercussions for local public finances and financial sector stability."

Continue Reading for Free

Register and gain access to:

  • Breaking commercial real estate news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
  • Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
  • Critical coverage of the property casualty insurance and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, PropertyCasualty360 and ThinkAdvisor
NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.