Working From Home and Corporate Real Estate

We examine how corporate real estate market participants adjust to the take-off of teleworking. We develop an index for the exposure of counties to teleworking in France by combining teleworking capacity with incentives and frictions to its deployment. We find that the valuation of offices declined more in areas more exposed to telecommuting, a pattern that we do not observe for retail assets. In addition, we show that telecommuting increases vacancy, decreases construction, while transaction volumes are not affected. It implies that the drop in price is due to a shift in demand for space. In addition, our result suggests that market participants are expecting the shift to teleworking to durably affect the demand for office space.