Overnight News: The office building of the future is suburban, low-rise, gated, guarded, video-monitored and patrolled.

If you pursue the comments on Pedro Robinson’s article, linked below, you’ll see me prophesying on every rooted thing.

If you read me here, you know my take: The Ants who can work from home are fleeing everything Grasshopper as fast as they can. Gun sales are slowing, so that may imply that the Ant flight to safety is abating, but the trend will continue – much as every other disruptive influence in real estate will continue: Malls will die, taking cinemas with them, and, assuming the Marxists don’t devour the gig economy, the relative value of car-focused commercial real estate will continue to decline.

With one exception: Low-rise office complexes surrounded by their own parking lots have a bright future, I expect.

The reason is simple: Security is now the boss’s job. It used to be the police who kept the bad guys away from the taxpayers, but that’s all gone to hell – even in comparatively-sane places like Arizona, Florida or Texas. Accordingly, the office of the future will offer these amenities:

• Suburban location with easy freeway access
• Low-rise construction; no more beehives
• Vigilant, multi-layered security

If necessary, the parking lot will be fenced and gated – and video-monitored, regardless. The common areas will be patrolled and monitored – with pre-existing pass technology limiting access passively, continuously, anyway.

The point would be to take away the fears not-working-from-home colleagues have of returning to a grim vertical office tower surrounded by vagrants and shunned by respectable taxpayers.

I think employers should focus on maximizing value from their working-from-home employees, but if they’re going to insist on having offices, sprawling mini-fortresses are the offices they are going to have, going forward.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates slip back down to 2.96%.

Pedro Robinson: What the Hell is Actually Going on with Housing??

Joy Pullmann: What Happens When Hedge Funds Buy Up Neighborhoods? I’d like to put a damper on this hysteria by quoting this article’s subhead: “A real estate firm estimates ‘that in many of the nation’s top markets, roughly one in every five houses sold is bought by someone who never moves in.'” In bread-and-butter neighborhoods, single-family housing on fee-simple dirt is typically one-fifth to one-third rentals. Hedge funds were buying when almost no one else was, and by now they are outbid on almost everything. Meanwhile, too many rentals will hurt property values – and America’s buyer pool now has all the world’s residential real estate to choose from. IOW: Static Market Fallacy. Things will change, and you can’t put a corner on silver, in any case.

Zero Hedge: Core Consumer Prices Surge At Fastest Rate Since 1992.

Julie Kelly: Letters from a D.C. Jail: The rule of law for anyone involved in the events of January 6 has been flipped on its head by the U.S. justice system; defendants are presumed guilty before proven innocent.