Thank you for this. It’s an interesting set of observations, that Amazon are calling their employees back to the office to protect Seattle’s real estate market. In Seattle’s case, this threat is made real by the size of Amazon and Microsoft’s presence.

You suggest that large scale work-from-home undermines both business and residential property values, possibly to a catastrophic level. You imply that the 2008 financial crisis might have been influenced by similar trends. It makes me wonder whether London could be influenced in such a way, although it is seeing a decline in banking jobs and most of the tech. companies are already located somewhere cheaper. Central government is struggling with the problem, but I am not sure they’ve thought that hard about it. I don’t think London is so reliant on such dominant businesses as Seattle; I wonder if it’s a threat to Reading or Edinburgh. London does suffer from an overheated housing market caused by a lack of supply, a failure to build and foreign, often oligarchic, money driving prices up from the top. Rising interest rates will also put a squeeze on the funding of houses.

You are right to recognise the potential threat to middle class wealth and it will hit the poor even worse, and for many the option of WFH is not possible as they are interacting with the real world, often in services.

I would add that there are counter centrifugal forces, such as jurisdictional issues; US experienced and long term business planners will not want people employed in jurisdictions with good employee protection laws, at the moment, redundancy protection will be on their minds but working hours, mandatory expenses and the social wage will be others issues that US managements will seek to exercise an arbitrage on.