Return-to-office policies are driving people to sell their homes - even at a loss

COL Randall C. Shortly after the return to work call, the no-longer Fortune 100 company, (but still Fortune 500) turned around and laid off 11% of the workforce - including SIL. It was the second to last day of the return to work "grace period." So a few folks got double whammied - had to upend life to return to work, only to not have a job once they got there.

But, according to SIL who was pretty high up the chain (2 people removed from the C-suite), a whole hell of a lot of the return to work policies had nothing to do with priorities or opportunities.

Black Rock owns a piece of just about everything. https://hedgefollow.com/funds/BlackRock

And they also have a metric shit ton of money sunk into real estate, especially commercial real estate. And all of the companies NOT going back to the office was completely torching the value of their real estate holdings. So... they put pressure on all of the companies they owned to get people back into the office.

I cannot confirm this to be true, but I have no reason to doubt SIL on this, and I know she had access to the information. It also makes a lot of logical sense.

If true, essentially what has happened here is a few super rich folks screwed over a ton of mid-level workers just to make sure they wouldn't lose money.

SFC Casey O'Mally COL Randall C. I will say, however, that the company *did* give generous severance packages. So they at least did that much.

SFC Casey O'Mally - Sounds like a good hypothetical argument. No opinion one way or another on it and digging into the information to see if there is information (what commercial real estate holdings they have, what/how much company investments they have, which of those companies have leases with those real-estate companies, etc.) would be way too time consuming.

The BlackRock CEO has a very definite view of the limitations of remote work, and BlackRock has about 4/5th of their investments in companies that get at least 50% of their revenue or profits from commercial, industrial, or residential real estate. With that, I'll grant you that it's a possibility those communications could be happening behind the scenes. However, I'll bin it in the hypothetical column of the rest of the "maybe possible" items.
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* https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/larry-fink-ceo-letter

COL Randall C. I'm pretty much in the same boat. Way too lazy to dive down *that* rabbit hole. Especially with how hard it would be to get inside information about inner working and top-level decision making.

I leave it at "sounds logical and I have no reason to doubt vital. But I am also not going to claim it as fact." Or in science terms - theory that has yet to be proven or disproven.