The novel coronavirus may do to U.S. office rentals what e-commerce did to malls, or so goes a line of thinking running through commercial real estate circles.

If anything, millions more Americans working from home may hasten corporate moves to downsize their offices, a decade-old trend partially responsible for the office sector underperforming other property asset classes in recent years.

This has come even as the leasing business boomed in New York with a surging jobs market and economic expansion that was upended by orders to close offices to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.