Working From Home and Corporate Real Estate

Abstract : We examine how corporate real estate market participants adjust to the take-off of teleworking. We develop an indicator of the exposure of counties to teleworking in France by combining teleworking capacity with incentives and frictions to its deployment. We study how this indicator relates to prices and quantities in the corporate real estate market. We find that for offices in counties more exposed, the Covid-19 crisis has led to (1) higher vacancy rates, (2) less construction, (3) lower prices. Our findings reveal that teleworking has already an impact on the office market. Furthermore, forward-looking indicators suggest that market participants are anticipating the shift to teleworking to be durable.