Rising unemployment and widespread availability of a COVID-19 vaccine were also issues of growing concern.

"COVID-19 has dealt every market across the country a set of challenges and circumstances no one could have anticipated," said Charles Wurtzebach, Douglas and Cynthia Crocker Endowed Director, the Real Estate Center, DePaul University."Yet people want to be optimistic; they are tired of COVID and want it to be over."

That may explain why a third of those surveyed were optimistic or trending optimistic.

Experts anticipate a variety of post-Pandemic office configurations as employers embrace work from home [WFH] strategies, while looking to ensure productivity and sustain company culture.

"We're in a severe economic recession. The question everyone wants answered is how long does that last; and we don't know," says Keith Largay, Senior Managing Director & Chicago Office Co-Head, JLL. "It's hard to predict the outcome and unintended consequences of 40 million job losses and the stress it puts on the balance sheets of people, companies, and governments."

More than six in 10, or 61.5 percent, expect firms to shrink their space requirements as employers embrace WFH. Employers' ability to offer alternatives to avoid public transportation, elevators and other high density venues may prove too hard to resist unless working from home puts too much strain on productivity, said the real restate report.

More than three quarters (76.2 percent) of participants said they foresee a nominal to modest increase in suburban investments as the appetite for city spaces shrinks.

"The suburbs could benefit from the changing patterns we're seeing," says Sue Blumberg, Senior Managing Director, NorthMarq. "We could see renters looking to the suburbs where units and outdoor spaces are larger."

A benefactor of all the uncertainty may be single story office buildings and complexes—those that offer private entries and minimal common area spaces, said Michael Newman, Principal, President and CEO of Golub Company. "It could be an increased area of demand in the suburbs," Newman said.

The market uncertainty and volatility is causing investors to pause. Many are looking at defensive options like debt positions where there is a layer of equity as a buffer just in case valuations are off the mark. Others are looking at opportunities with more risk.

As a result, the recovery of Chicago's real estate markets is most likely going to be shaped like a Nike Swoosh say 42.5 percent, or the letter "W", according to 33.5 percent of participants in the DePaul-ULI Chicago survey.

"Buying during a recession tends to create good outcomes. But we're in the early days of a recession unlike anything we've seen before," says Mary Ludgin, Senior Managing Director, Head of Global Research, Heitman. "There are lots of chapters to this story.

"We're in chapter one or two of maybe a six- or eight-chapter book."