The accelerating shift to flexible, remote work is proving to be a growing pain point for some in the nation's commercial real estate industry. For home-sharing giant Airbnb, however, it's expected to be a major source of future growth.

The San Francisco-based company, which provides a platform for short-term rental listings, said the influx of employees able to work from anywhere is expected to translate into a boost for Airbnb. It is betting that not only will more people seek out its properties for remote work, but those workers will put their own homes on the rental platform while they're out of town themselves.

"Travel will come back, and when it does, it will look different than before," Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told investors on the company's first earnings call as a publicly traded company. "The biggest difference we've seen is flexibility, and in the world of Zoom where most people can work from home, people can work from home on Airbnb."

Airbnb isn't the only name in the hospitality sector looking to capitalize on the remote-work trends as the travel and lodging industry reels from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. While large hotel chains such as Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton and Intercontinental Hotels Group slog through depressed occupancy rates and various capacity restrictions, a number of hotels have advertised their rooms as temporary workstations with access to amenities such as fitness centers, meeting space, room service or simply a place to nap.

Airbnb expects many will continue to choose its hosts, becoming a permanent fixture of its future expansion.

"Because more people can work from home on a laptop, it means they can work from home anywhere," Chesky said. "People are more likely to take three-day weekends or go away for the summer. People aren't just traveling on Airbnb, they're living on Airbnb, and that's here to stay."

The shift wasn't so certain at the start of the pandemic a year ago. Almost overnight, Chesky said Airbnb's business dropped by 80% at the onset of the healthcare crisis.

"When our business was precipitously falling, we knew we couldn't focus on everything," Chesky said of laying off about 25% of its total workforce last May, pulling the plug on new investments and strictly curbing expenses on some of its fixed costs. "We saved money and proved the inherent adaptability of our model, which is why we saw a very strong recovery in the back end of last year."

One of its fixed expenses on the chopping block is its 82,852-square-foot Showplace Square office building in San Francisco, a property it has leased for more than three years but is now marketing for sublet, according to CoStar. The creative office space at 650 Seventh St. in the city's SoMa neighborhood is being marketed by CBRE Group, which is advertising the space with a lease term through February 2023.

At its worst point last year, Airbnb reported $335 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2020, a 72% drop compared to the same period a year earlier. It rebounded quickly in the second half of the year, and the company reported revenue of more than $1.34 billion in the third quarter and $859 million in revenue for the fourth quarter. All told, Airbnb's full-year revenue was almost $3.4 billion, a 30% decline from 2019.

While the company is planning to spend more on capital expenditures this year, mainly on office improvements in North America, the amount is expected to be "significantly lower than 2019," it said in a shareholder letter, adding that most of the investments it intends to make this year stem from projects that were delayed in 2020.

The company, which went public late last year, outperformed its closest competition while every major hospitality business across the board reported significant drops in business.

Expedia Group, which owns competing rental platform Vrbo, reported a 58% decrease in lodging revenue for the fourth quarter of 2020. However, it said revenue per room night benefited from an increase in Vrbo business, which it said has a higher revenue per room night rate than the rest of the company's lodging business.