From factory to free-range offices. At a price.

In turn, does that mean new opportunities for tenants to negotiate rents in less prestigious buildings, leading to lower occupancy costs for a wider cross section of CBD occupiers who are content with the older style office factory. Is the problem here that while the older style low-cost office may appeal to the business, it may not appeal to that business' workers?

The magnitude of changes are hard to get your head around. Reluctance to return to the pre covid mode of work seems – for the time being at least – unlikely to change. Bloomberg City Lab reported this week that: "The average New York City office worker intends to reduce time in the office by 49% and slash annual spending in the city by $6,730, down from an estimated $12,561 before the pandemic, according to Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University."

(There is a good PowerPoint on the latest WFH research by Stanford Professor Nicholas Bloom, which you can find here).

Meanwhile, on the west coast USA, Apple workers are reportedly rejecting mandates to return to their $5 billion new, futuristic, purpose built headquarters in Cupertino. That mandate is hardly intimidating. According to New York Post, "Apple CEO Tim Cook is ordering all corporate employees back into the office at least one day per week beginning on April 11. The mandate ratchets up to two days per week on May 2 and three days per week on May 23." But that's enough for some to exclaim: "I don't give a single f-k about ever coming back to work here… I'm going to go in to say hello and meet everyone since I haven't since I started and then sending in my resignation when I get home," the employee wrote. "I already know I won't be able to deal with the commute and sitting around for 8 hours."

All this seems to point to CBDs becoming even more conspicuous as places for the high-end professional class, who (by virtue of living closer to the CBD in higher price housing) already enjoy shorter commutes than the worker drones, and who may also soon be offered more lavish workplaces to entice them back to work in even more highly valued buildings. Meanwhile, reluctant worker drones who once spent hours commuting to a computer screen in some anonymous cubicle, may rarely venture back. CBDs, which were once intensely active centres of employment for everyone from lowly clerks through to managing directors, may become even more concentrated centres of privilege and power. No more factory hens but instead free-range chooks. Plus an awful lot of roosters?

Comedy can be a great tool in drawing out the irony of changes like this. This British sketch is a pearler.