Remote Work's Second Chapter
Why the death of the city was exaggerated
The story we told ourselves in 2021 was simple.
“Remote work is permanent. Big cities are dying. Everyone is moving to Montana or Colorado.”
Some of that turned out to be true, and some of it turned out to be exactly what it looked like at the time: people making permanent decisions based on temporary circumstances.
Here’s where we actually are in 2026, and what it means for where rental demand is concentrated.
What Actually Happened With Return to Office
About 22% of US employees work remotely at least part of the time as of early 2026. That’s down slightly from 23% in 2024, and it includes both fully remote and hybrid workers. The majority of those people, roughly 53%, are in hybrid arrangements.
The return-to-office wave is real. Amazon, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, AT&T, and the federal government all moved to five-day in-office policies in 2025. Instagram followed in early 2026. Disney, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and others have tightened to three or four days.
But hybrid held. It didn’t go away.
What we’re actually living through is not a return to 2019. It’s a new normal where most knowledge workers show up three to four days a week, not five. That sounds like a small distinction. It isn’t.
Why Three to Four Days Changes Everything
When you work fully remote, you can live anywhere. We saw that play out dramatically in the first two years of the pandemic.
When you work hybrid three to four days a week, you can’t really live anywhere. But you also don’t have to live in the most expensive neighborhood adjacent to your office. You have a commute tolerance that’s wider than it used to be, which opens up a ring of geography that wasn’t viable before.
That’s why suburban office occupancy has held up dramatically better than urban cores since 2020. And it’s why the “suburbs of the suburbs,” as some people are calling them, have become genuinely interesting from an investment standpoint.
The hybrid worker isn’t looking for a one-bedroom in the urban core anymore. They’re looking for more space, better value, and a commute they can tolerate two to three days a week. That might mean a larger unit in an inner-ring suburb with a 30-minute drive to the office. It might mean a secondary market that’s close enough to a major employment hub to be feasible on in-office days.
What This Doesn’t Look Like
The 2021 Zoom Town narrative, where markets like Bozeman, Boise, and Austin absorbed an enormous amount of demand from workers who were fully location-independent, was real. But it was also built on an assumption that didn’t fully survive. A lot of those workers got called back, or found that being three time zones from their colleagues came with career costs they hadn’t fully priced in.
The markets that absorbed the most speculative demand during that window are also some of the markets that have faced the most supply pressure and rent growth correction since.
The smarter version of the remote work bet for a multifamily investor today isn’t “pick the Zoom Town.” It’s understanding which employment bases are genuinely hybrid and which suburban submarkets sit at a commutable distance from them. That’s a much more granular underwriting exercise than it sounds.
The Practical Takeaway
Remote work reshaped the demand map, and then return-to-office partially un-reshaped it. But what we’re left with is not a return to the old map. Hybrid is sticky enough and widespread enough that commute patterns have genuinely changed.
Operators who understand that their submarket draws from a workforce that’s in the office two to three days a week are running their properties differently. They’re thinking about unit size differently. They’re thinking about in-unit workspaces differently. They’re thinking about parking differently.
That’s the level of submarket nuance that separates sponsors who really know their market from those who just know the macro trends.
