For most of the twentieth century, where you lived was determined largely by where you worked. If your job was in the city, you lived near the city — or you spent a significant portion of your day getting to it. This was not a choice most people actively made; it was a structural constraint. The geography of employment set the geography of housing demand, and that in turn shaped which property markets appreciated, which suburbs grew, and which areas stagnated.
That constraint is loosening. Not completely, not uniformly, and not in every industry — but enough that it now represents one of the most significant structural shifts affecting real estate demand in both the US and Australia. Remote work and the rise of independent, location-flexible businesses are changing where people choose to live, and that change has direct implications for where property value is generated — and where it is at risk.
This chapter looks at where remote work actually stands right now, what the rise of solopreneurship adds to the picture, what has already happened to property markets as a result, and what investors should make of it going forward.
Where Remote Work Actually Stands
There has been a lot of noise since 2022 about return-to-office mandates. Some large employers — Amazon, Commonwealth Bank, various government agencies in both countries — have pushed for more in-person attendance. This has generated significant media coverage and led many people to assume that remote work is retreating back toward pre-pandemic norms. The data does not support that conclusion.
In the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in November 2024, 23.3% of workers performed some work from home for pay, and 10.9% worked entirely from home. These figures sit well above pre-pandemic levels, where remote work was a minority arrangement in most industries. A 2025 BLS analysis confirmed that both the prevalence of remote work and its intensity have settled significantly above where they were before 2020.
The Global Survey of Working Arrangements — a large academic survey covering college-educated full-time workers across 22 countries — tracked average work-from-home days declining from 1.6 days per week in 2022 to 1.27 days per week in 2024-2025, then stabilizing. The key word is stabilizing. The research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July 2025 concluded that the post-pandemic retreat from remote work has largely bottomed out. The new normal for remote-capable workers is roughly one to one-and-a-quarter days working from home per week globally — permanently above pre-2020 levels.
In the US, 69% of companies offered hybrid or remote options in 2025. Among workers, 50 to 60% say they would quit if forced back to full-time office work. Only 12% of US executives with hybrid or remote staff plan a full return-to-office mandate in the next twelve months.
Australia tells a similar story. Roy Morgan data for the year to June 2025 found that 6.7 million Australians work from home at least some of the time. In the major CBDs, 60% of workers report working from home at some frequency — with Sydney CBD leading at nearly 70%. Across the country, 53% of Australian employees work remotely at least part-time, and 14% work entirely from home. 69% of Australian employers offer hybrid work arrangements. The 2024 National Working Families Survey found that 76% of Australian workers would not consider jobs without flexible arrangements. Remote work in Australia settled at approximately 36.3% in 2024 — down marginally from the pandemic peak, but holding well above pre-pandemic levels.
This is the baseline: remote and hybrid work are not temporary conditions that COVID introduced and that employers are now reversing. They are structural features of the modern labor market. The degree varies by industry — technology and finance lead, while trades, healthcare, retail, and hospitality remain largely in-person — but for the substantial portion of the workforce that can work remotely, the expectation of location flexibility is now embedded. That expectation was not there a decade ago.
The Rise of Solopreneurship and Location-Independent Business
Parallel to remote work is the growth of solopreneurship — people running businesses entirely on their own, without employees, typically from home. This is not the same as remote employment, but it produces the same geographic freedom.
In the US, there are approximately 29.8 million solopreneurs, collectively generating $1.7 trillion in annual revenue — roughly 6.8% of total US economic output. 84% of all US businesses now operate without employees, up from 76% in 1997. 56% of today’s solopreneurs started their businesses after 2020, driven by pandemic-era disruptions, rising inflation, and the availability of digital tools that make running a business from a laptop genuinely viable. Australia and the US have recorded among the highest growth rates in freelance and solo business numbers globally in recent years.
The solopreneur and location-independent business model matters for housing in a specific way: it removes the commute calculation entirely. A remote employee may still need to live within a reasonable distance of an office for two or three days a week. A solopreneur operating entirely online has no such constraint. Their home is their office, their clients are wherever the internet reaches, and their choice of where to live is governed almost entirely by lifestyle preference, affordability, and personal circumstances.
This cohort is growing; it skews toward younger and mid-career professionals, and it disproportionately represents people who would otherwise have been driving demand for housing in or near capital cities. When that constraint dissolves, their housing demand does not disappear — it relocates.
