From the moment the implications of the varying international orders to “stay at home” became clear, there have been questions about the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic would have on commercial real estate and the built environment.

As shares in Zoom and Peloton went skywards, confidence in real estate became significantly less stable. In the UK, for instance, retail investors rushed to make redemptions from open-ended funds, lead-ing to the kind of mass gating that we had not seen since the weeks following the Brexit referendum in 2016. Institutional investors seemed to feel simi-larly pessimistic, with 93 percent of respondents to Deloitte’s annual Real Estate Confidence survey expressing a negative view of market conditions and activity levels by April 2020.

Sentiment has stabilised significantly since the initial shockwaves of lockdown, yet conversations around the opportunities for commercial real estate still seem to fall broadly into one of two camps: th