Americans are working from home at much higher rates than Europeans or Asians. In July, office occupancy in Asia was 79 percent. Occupancy in Europe was 75 percent. In the U.S., it was 48 percent.

Those numbers are according to Matthew Boyle, writing for Bloomberg. That disparity in office occupancy is reflected in a disparity in real-estate value lost. San Francisco is projected to see a 22.4 percent decline in office demand by 2030. (See Andrew Stuttaford’s post from June about that.) New York is projected to have a 17.6 percent decline. Tokyo, on the other hand, is only projected to have a 7.6 percent decline, and Paris 8.2 percent.

Asian workers have more uniformly gone back to the office, while in Europe, remote work varies more from country to country. The U.K. has a high rate of remote work, and France has a low one, Boyle writes.

U.S. companies are taking very different approaches, with little input from government. There are two ways that might shake out. One is that a certain balance of remote and in-person work will demonstrate itself to be most conducive to business and will win out over time. The other is that different businesses will succeed with different balances that work for their employees or industry, and the varied approaches will persist.

Regardless, real estate in major cities’ business districts seems likely to take a big hit. (Andrew was on that back in March.) Boyle points to a McKinsey study that estimates between $800 billion and $1.3 trillion in office real-estate value will be wiped out by 2030 in just nine major cities (Beijing, Houston, London, New York, Paris, Munich, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Tokyo). Of those cities, Houston shows the strongest future demand in office real estate, projected to increase 2 percent by 2030.

One reason for Americans’ greater tendency to work from home is that they have larger homes than people in other countries, so they are more likely to have space for a home office. “In Hong Kong, tiny apartments and an efficient public transport system have given residents fewer reasons to work from home,” Boyle writes.

Americans are also much more likely to say working from home is good for them. “The proportion of people in America who said their productivity while working remotely was at optimal levels was almost double that in the rest of the world,” Boyle writes. “Workers in Europe and Asia are more concerned about missing out on social connections with co-workers than Americans.”

“Any leader who keeps hoping things will get ‘back to normal’ will be disappointed, because the workplace is fundamentally different now,” Boyle writes. That seems correct. The trial-and-error process will play out over the next few years as companies experiment with different approaches. The Covid pandemic opened a new area in which employers can choose to be flexible, and American employees value flexibility highly, so expect the U.S. outlier status to persist.