“Return to office!”
Why?
“Because otherwise these buildings we bought are worthless!”
Ok, hard pass.
“In that case, with our new-found leverage, we’d like to formally request a 40% pay increase and a 4-day work week to compensate for the inconvenience of propping up your failed real estate ventures. We look forward to your affirmative response.”
That’d be a lot easier with some sort of collective group that could make such a deal.
You want to bargain collectively? Presenting a united front? What would you even call such a thing?
Somehow, when people talk about “the government overregulating things”, they never mean the insane amount of regulation in place in the US to prevent effective collective labour action.
deleted by creator
My current employer did just that – sold the space, sold the desks, and then enshrined remote work in the union contract.
Since they weren’t tied to an office, people could work from anywhere the privacy and security regs allowed. That’s the entire country. Turn-over is incredibly slow, but we can now pull from a national talent pool for a 100%WFH job. Competition is gonna heat up.
Lucky they found a buyer
deleted by creator
It’s a very funny video with a clip of Ben Shapiro saying that the coast going underwater doesn’t matter because people can just sell up and move. And hbomberguy asks who he thinks they’re going to sell to, Aquaman?
deleted by creator
For the right price, yeah. You’ll be able to sell coastal properties for the right price too. Just nowhere near as much as you paid for them. They’re not interested in getting only some of it back.
You can reuse commercial buildings for other things (like residential sky rise). You cannot reuse underwater homes.
deleted by creator
Commercial real estate loans are interest only? I had never heard of that before, but it makes sense with the buried lede:
borrowers prefer handing the property keys over to creditors over putting good money after bad
Which is what happens whenever a company has an asset they don’t own and no longer want. Shrug and handover the keys. Seems to me like the lenders are going to be the ones taking the haircut, despite what the article asserts.
The lenders are the banks…sounds like an '08 again.
Yep and it will end in massive public giveaway in free loan money to retrofit buildings to something useful, like residential(yes I know of the challenges but there is no better option). Even progressive cities are fucked because their downtown cores that they sold gladly sold out or allowed to be developed out from under their constituents have almost all their tax dollars coming from CRE so they are levered to pro up CRE.
There is at least one other option: Vertical Farming. I saw one of these in San Francisco go up, but there’s quite a few cities trying it out:
deleted by creator
Also it would require changing commercial buildings to industrial. I’m not an expert on this but soil weighs a lot so unless these are plant nurseries I would expect its a more expensive transition than than residential as we’re talking adding like forklift elevators and drains to everything.
I hope they’ll do retrofits. I wonder what that would do to the housing market. If it actually made housing affordable a huge chunk of investors and home owners would be royally pissed. Great way to decrease homelessness, and I might be able to afford a house, but I doubt they’ll do it for that and previous reasons.
The other sad part is it answers many problems on traffic and congestion by doing what most countries do to enable density; build up not out with incredible efficiency gains. There are many social benefits as well and in a society that struggles with depression and loneliness as much as America, hard to think of a solution that solves as many problems as taking empty buildings and adding affordable housing.
They’re called balloon loans. They’re pretty common for mortgages anywhere outside the US. Instead of paying principal plus interest each period, you only pay the interest. At the end of the term, you pay the principal itself.
They also can’t just hand the keys back unless it’s in the original contract or the bank agrees. If a lot of companies are choosing to ditch their properties, the banks will choose to refuse this option.
🎻
Time to stop eating all that avocado toast!
