Real Estate Market 2020 Onward

Thoughts about the next few years

Real Estate is the largest asset class in America. For those who know me personally or professionally, you know that I’ve spent the last few years learning about real estate in depth. I’ve been fortunate to learn from the best and have been given access to data, trends, and wisdom from people who’ve built wealth through building and managing real estate portfolios.

It’s quite difficult to accurately speculate on something which is actually a catch-all term. Real estate is a vague asset class and contains many subclasses which all behave relatively differently and respond to negative shocks and expansions differently. Even subclasses have subclasses. When you’re talking about Commercial Real Estate which is a subclass of the broader real estate market, you’re grouping together office buildings, multifamily housing, medical centers, malls, and many other types of assets which can behave differently.

The pandemic and resulting lock downs this year have had people looking at three specific types of real estate very differently. One, which seems to be most people’s favorite, is single family housing. Another is multifamily housing. Third, office spaces. I’ll be discussing office spaces and multi family housing aspects briefly, then largely focus on single family housing in this post as that’s what I’ve had the most experience with in my career.

Office Spaces

Photo by LYCS Architecture on Unsplash

With a lot of companies forced to go fully remote, there seems to be a lot of speculation on the future of office spaces. With announcements of Twitter, Facebook, and Slack going fully remote going forward, many big brains with bigger mouths are now saying office spaces are going to be no longer a thing or way less of a thing.

That won’t happen.

Leases might be renegotiated in the short term but in the future the office space will still be a reliable future source of income for building owners. Keep in mind that although WeWork’s valuation was massively inflated, their growth and expansion was real, and there was very strong demand for their services from people who had opportunities to work from home full time.