Coronavirus Is Going to Create New Real Estate Winners
Remote work will help far-flung exurbs and second-tier cities in the South and West gain at the expense of pricey coastal cities.
The shortest commute.
Photographer: Qilai Shen/BloombergThe coronavirus is going to change the way we work whether we like it or not -- at least for the short term and maybe longer.
To take just one example: Twitter said it would let employees work from home even after the Covid-19 crisis has passed. Although it's too early to say how much of a lasting change in work culture we'll get, even a temporary shift such as this should be great news for residential real estate in at least two types of communities: the exurbs of high-cost coastal cities and second-tier cities with similar amenities but more limited job markets than their larger coastal peers.
A shift to work from home helps to lift the constraint of physical proximity for workers with certain kinds of jobs, allowing them to consider a wider range of places to live than when they had to be in the office five days a week. This has benefits both at the individual and the collective level. In a region such as the San Francisco Bay Area, with lots of tech jobs but expensive and limited housing, the average commute time is 32 minutes. If a person there worked from home one day a week, that's an hour a week not spent commuting. If these practices are adopted by most white-collar employers, that would take a lot of vehicles off the road during peak commuting times, reducing congestion and shortening drive times for everyone else.