The COVID-19 pandemic is transforming real estate in ways no one predicted and no one can forecast. A few who seemed to know something that I wasn’t privy to simply didn’t seem interested in tipping their hands. Others were still just trying to stem their own bloodshed and didn’t want to go on record about how bad the present reality still really is. Some people I contacted for this story weren’t even interested in commenting-mostly because they didn’t want to be wrong. The answer is that at this point in the pandemic, even at the highest levels of global real estate, no one really knows for sure what comes next.

So why isn’t anyone talking about what this all means long-term?

And the ongoing uncertainty about what the real estate landscape will look like on the other side of the pandemic-and more importantly, how consumers will re-prioritize how they embrace physical space after the masks come off-is still leaving most real estate developers, investors, and businesses on the sidelines and on edge. The bottom line is that it’s still brutal out there-whatever you read, wherever you live, or whatever your view is on COVID-19’s origins or its politics.