A Few Observations from
"The Great Pause"

In the spring of 2020, something unusual happened in commercial real estate: we conducted an involuntary global experiment in remote work. Overnight, nearly every knowledge worker on earth worked from somewhere other than their leased office space. The buildings stayed. The leases stayed. But the people left.

What that experiment revealed — about how we use space, what the office is actually for, and where the real financial exposure sits in a commercial real estate portfolio — was hiding in plain sight for years. Some of those observations remain highly relevant today.

What the Pause Revealed

The most significant revelation was how little friction the transition created for many organizations. Companies that had invested in collaboration technology, clear communication processes, and results-oriented management frameworks found that productivity held up reasonably well in the short term. The prediction that organizations would collapse without physical co-location turned out to be wrong — at least in the immediate term.

The longer-term story is more nuanced. The things that degraded most noticeably were the informal interactions that build organizational culture, accelerate the development of junior employees, and create the serendipitous connections that generate new ideas. These are real costs that do not show up in quarterly productivity metrics but compound significantly over time.

The Utilization Reality

The pause also forced organizations to look at their utilization data — often for the first time. Buildings that had been running at 60-70% utilization on a normal Tuesday suddenly revealed that real estate portfolios had been sized for a theoretical maximum occupancy that almost never occurred in practice.

This is not a new insight. Utilization studies had been producing the same finding for years. What changed was the urgency. When the financial implications of excess space were visible and immediate — lease liabilities on balance sheets, rent obligations accumulating for empty buildings — the organizational will to act finally materialized.

What Office Is Actually For

The pause generated a useful clarifying question: if people can work effectively from home, what is the office actually for? The honest answer, it turned out, was not "to do the work." It was for things that are genuinely difficult to replicate remotely: onboarding and mentorship, high-bandwidth creative collaboration, building the trust and relationships that make organizations function, and creating a physical expression of the organization's culture and ambition.

This reframing has practical implications. If the office is primarily for collaboration and culture rather than heads-down individual work, then the right space design is different, the right amount of space is probably less, and the right locations are those that are genuinely accessible to the people who need to come together — not simply the buildings nearest to the CEO's home.

Landlord Exposure

The pause also revealed something about the financial condition of many commercial landlords that had not been visible before. Buildings that were carrying high vacancy before COVID found themselves in acute distress as the pause extended. CMBS loans that had been performing on paper began showing stress as rent collections dropped and refinancing timelines approached.

For tenants in those buildings, the lesson was clear: the creditworthiness of the landlord is part of the risk profile of the lease. A building in financial distress creates operational uncertainty — deferred maintenance, reduced services, potential ownership transitions — that affects the tenant regardless of whether the lease is technically current.

The Tenant Opportunity

Uniquely for tenants, the pause created a window of opportunity that did not exist before. Landlords who needed rent certainty, lenders who needed occupancy stability, and markets that had softened materially all combined to create negotiating conditions that were historically unusual. The tenants who acted during that window — restructuring above-market leases, negotiating buyouts of excess space, or locking in new leases at trough market rents with flexibility provisions — are still benefiting from those decisions today.

Looking Forward

The office is not going away. But it is being redefined. The organizations that will use it most effectively are those that are intentional about what they want it to do — and willing to size and design their portfolios accordingly, rather than simply continuing to carry what they have always carried because changing is complicated.

The great pause did not create these dynamics. It revealed them. The question for every occupier now is whether to act on what the pause made visible.