Since early in the pandemic, office landlords have maintained that work-from-home would not cripple their big-city portfolios.
But talk is cheap. Who backed up their bluster with billions of dollars in office investments?
Tishman Speyer and Brookfield did, their executives said Wednesday at a forum in Qatar. Rob Speyer said that since March, his firm had plowed $12 billion into properties that represented “generational buying opportunities,” Bloomberg News reported.
“We have been active during Covid in Paris, in Washington, D.C., in San Francisco, in London and people are just selling off real estate at 25 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent discounts,” he said, according to the publication.
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Brookfield Asset Management CEO Bruce Flatt said there is big money to be made “buying in these great cities where people have a different and more pessimistic view of them,” the report added. He did not specify how much Brookfield invested in offices during the pandemic, though.
Even work-from-work proponent Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has said his company will only have 60 desks for every 100 office workers as hybrid models become standard. But office investors believe vaccinations, low interest rates, school reopenings, remote-work fatigue and other factors will lead to an office space shortage.
[Bloomberg News] — Erik Engquist