Will homes with offices be popular for much longer?

Q: Right now, there’s a huge interest in home offices. But once people increasingly go back to work, won’t the attraction of homes with one or two offices fade?

A: There are several reasons to believe that an end to the pandemic will have little impact on the home office trend.

A “home office” is simply dedicated space, no different from a bedroom. There’s no need for special alterations; instead, owners have decided to use a given area for one purpose or another. If the property is sold or rented, the new occupants can elect to use the space differently without expensive renovations.

We don’t know what the “new normal” will look like once the pandemic ends, but there is every reason to believe that home offices will be more common than they were in 2019 before the pandemic struck. Here’s why.

Before the era of smartphones and home computers, the idea of a central office setting was well established because formal offices were seen as highly productive. However, in many cases today, the equipment available to workers at work and at home is largely the same. Whether your computer is located in a downtown office tower or a spare bedroom doesn’t matter much, as long as you can connect to the internet. In fact, with laptops, many employees use the exact same work computer at home and at the office.

The reality is that working from home (WFH) was wellestablished before the pandemic. The 2019 American Time Use Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found that “24 percent of employed persons did some or all of their work at home on days they worked.”

Microsoft — with more than 160,000 employees worldwide — says “flexible work is here to stay, and the talent landscape has fundamentally shifted. Remote work has created new job opportunities for some, offered more family time and provided options for whether or when to commute. But there are also challenges ahead. Teams have become more siloed this year and digital exhaustion is a real and unsustainable threat.”

While working from home has its attractions, it also has drawbacks. Not everyone can successfully work by themselves. The social interactions available in a formal office setting are missing from home offices. The ability to mingle with managers and executives — often a key to advancement — is reduced.

For many employees, the new work pattern will likely be a hybrid model where they work in an official office part time — say three or four days a week — and work from home one or two days per week. One attraction of this approach is that it will substantially reduce the commuting volume in major cities.

As to real estate considerations, home offices are not going away. They’re a bonus for people who need them, extra space for those who don’t and an asset in either case.