The city I live in has a huge IT sector crowd and due to Pandemic almost all of them went to their hometown. Now most those companies stop renting those huge places with ridiculous rents, I work with one such firm. A firm of barly 50 people in it. We haven't rented any place since Pandemic and we dont plan to. But in past few months our Finance team (including our CFO) are getting almost threatening calls from local real estate vendors to come start the offices.
Not just that some even put their list of demands like
1. We have to call our employees to office or at least to this city so that their investment & rent houses are filled up.
2. They are not ready to decrease the rent, they want pre-pandemic rents plus 15% hike as it has been 2 years.
3. They want us to hire atleast 1 person, of their choice, @every 25 people we have in team so that they know if plan to shift our operations elsewhere.
They have threatened to not let us work ever in the cities our offices are if we don't “comply” with their “requests”.
Not sure how much we can hold off but I personally dont want people to unnecessarily come to office or even to this city as our work is mostly finance related support and not something location specific.