The CEO and co-founder of Blackstone, one of the largest commercial landlords in the world, went out of his way to take a swipe at remote workers at a high-end summit in Saudi Arabia this week, saying that people like to work from home because they are able to not “work as hard, regardless of what they tell you.”
Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman made the comment after being asked about the state of the commercial real estate market at the Future Investment Initiative summit in Riyadh.
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At a roundtable with people like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and hedge fund titan Ray Dalio, Schwarzman noted that people came to enjoy working from home during the coronavirus pandemic, during which time they found that they could save money by doing so and, so says Schwarzman, get away with doing less work.
The evidence to support Schwarzman’s view that remote workers don’t work as hard is murky at best. While some research has turned up evidence that productivity declines at home, other research has found the opposite.
Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford professor who studied remote work, has said comments by executives like Schwarzman’s are not in line with the data he’s reviewed. Remote work, Bloom recently wrote, “cuts overhead, boosts productivity and is profitable. And what is profitable in a capitalist economy sticks.”
Blackstone, the largest owner of commercial real estate in the world, has reduced its exposure to the U.S. office market greatly in recent years, from 60 percent of its real estate equity portfolio in 2007, when it went public, to 2 percent as of April, Schwarzman said in an investor call this April.
The company has instead of focused more of its attention on other areas of real estate, like warehouse logistics and rental housing, according to a company spokesperson.
At the summit, Schwarzman himself noted the dire nature of the office market, saying that one-fifth of office buildings in the U.S. office market are currently vacant, and another 20 percent are leased but largely unused.
This post has been updated to note that Blackstone has reduced its exposure to the U.S. office market in recent years.
