WFH Increasing

Takeaways from CNN business report today:

  • Transition away from office work is here for the long haul

  • Google will let employees work from home until at Least July 2021

  • Twitter and Facebook plan to let some employees work remotely indefinitely

  • Microsoft’s annual commercial cloud revenue increased to over $50 billion last quarter, 36% greater than the same quarter in 2019. The CEO said businesses are accelerating digitization of every part of operations from manufacturing to sales and customer service.

BLancaster

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For many cities a convergence of high rents, cramped housing, long commutes and the ability of more people to work remotely are causing an increase of people moving house and specifically out to the country. This, in my opinion, will only further cement the shift to work from home.

A couple of articles to demonstrate this in respect to London:

Relevant extract:
Property websites noted an increase in Londoners looking for homes outside the capital. Searches on Rightmove went up 51 per cent compared with 42 per cent this time last year.
Remote working could also be driving Londoners to seek alternative living spaces as companies begin to recognise that working from home could become the new normal once lockdown is lifted.
According to the London Chamber of Commerce, 13 per cent of business leaders said they have thought about making the shift to working from home completely and not using a permanent commercial office when the lockdown ends.
Nine per cent have already permanently closed their physical premises, including charity Action on Hearing Loss who announced this week it will no longer have a large office in London and will only maintain a meeting space.
And Escape the City, which helps people find work outside of the capital, told The Guardian that 51 per cent of new enquiries in the last fortnight were people wanting to leave London, compared with 20 per cent for the same period last year.
The organisation said on Twitter: “For the first time ever we have more people wanting to leave London than stay in it, which is a huge shift.”
Full article: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-…

Redrow (one of the UK’s largest housebuilders) responding to this shift by moving its operations to focus on its regional businesses:

https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/923068/r…

I live in central London, and have already started to notice this housing shift through friends recently. If a shift is so fundamental that it is contributing to people uprooting their lives, in my opinion this is just further evidence that it is here to stay. ‘Work from home’ is both a driver and beneficiary of this shift.

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