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Comment by rfwhyte | Hacker News Reader

The real reason CEOs want people back in office is 100% because they are broadly part of the same socio-economic class that owns the vast majority of commercial real estate around the world. They and their friends and family own all the commercial real estate, and high vacancy rates are are hurting their bottom lines and reducing the rate at which their property values increase, so they want people back in the office to prop up their property values and keep the commercial real estate graving train flowing.

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I've heard this before, but would the actual collusion mechanics be to make this happen? Like, my landlord buddy golfing just won't stop pestering me about getting my company to return to office so I convince the board of my company to do it?

There's probably no real mechanism, it's just that the circles they all run in agree "yes, yes, office life is important", the same way you're more likely to support some social issue if your friends do.

having money invested in some entity that owns commercial real estate would probably be plenty of motivation.

Most executives have major real estate holdings in their pension plans. If the employer owns the building, the employer and equity-owning executives have yet more real estate holdings, albiet indirectly.

Because of ZIRP, pensions have been reaching for yield by doing anything they can, and that has often been CMBS, CRE equity, CRE bank loans, etc.

This seems pretty absurd that CEOs would make huge decisions for their companies like RTO just because their kid goes to school with another kid whose parents own a bunch of office buildings.

I'd say there are many reasons, but I agree this is one of them.

That's maybe 10% of it. The other 90% is that they are narcissistic sociopaths that need people around them worshiping their every move.

ok. but I think video meetings support this use case pretty well.

One thing that video meetings don't support is higher-level managers throwing their weight around where they technically shouldn't.

When you have multiple levels of people working under you in an office, you can go down the management structure as many levels as you want just by dropping into people's offices, and there's no record of it and no way to prevent it. If you have to schedule a zoom call it shows up in people's calendars and gives worker's immediate supervisors the chance to intervene.

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