Commercial rent is absolutely a huge reason. However, you’re missing something. It’s an easy way to get rid of a certain percentage of folks. A lot of MBAs, and by extension a lot of the C-Suite, act like employees are perfectly spherical and operate in a vacuum. So if they need to shrink their workforce by X% it doesn’t matter which employees leave.

Unfortunately for the employers the high performers are generally (not always) the ones with more options.