“Return to office!”
Why?
“Because otherwise these buildings we bought are worthless!”
Ok, hard pass.
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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"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.
Or maybe don't return to office and then they can sell the building and recover some lost equity?
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
Your Piped link doesn't work (as per usual with Piped).
Regardless I'm not watching it. Maybe you'd like to just make your point?
I'm advocating for not returning to office and questioning the logic in the comment I replied to, which I assume Shapiro is not.
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?
Haha that's a good one.
Nah, there will be buyers for commercial buildings for the right price. Not pretending like they're going to get all of their investment back but as I said, you can still get some of it back.
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.
Already covered.
I have no idea why people are trying to pretend it's not worrying the owners of these buildings when the owners of these buildings are throwing hissy fits all over the shop.
Who's going to pay $1 for an underwater home? No, these things are not alike.
Which is why I said "dangerously close". Office buildings which are empty because they're not needed as offices any more can be sold to developers who will turn them into housing or shops. But with fewer employers based there, demand for housing and shops may also disappear.
Or they can just be sold to other employers who actually need them?
Where are those employers coming from? The issue arises precisely because companies don't need anything like as much office space as they used to.
Some employers do, some don't. Maybe new businesses come along that need office space but couldn't previously afford it.
Yes, obviously. Is the number of employers who no longer need the office space larger or smaller than the number of employers who need more office space?
They're going to make a loss. They do not want to make a loss. No amount of imaginary buyers is going to stop them having to take a loss.
Yeah, I know, I stated that in my original comment.
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:
As far as I can tell everyone who has tried this has failed. The energy for the grow lights is too expensive.
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!