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HootinNHollerin ,

Time to stop eating all that avocado toast!

sirnuke ,
@sirnuke@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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.

phdepressed ,

The lenders are the banks…sounds like an '08 again.

pdxfed ,

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.

comador ,
@comador@lemmy.world avatar

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:

smithsonianmag.com/…/empty-office-buildings-are-b…

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

As far as I can tell everyone who has tried this has failed. The energy for the grow lights is too expensive.

Fedizen ,

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.

pearable , (edited )

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.

pdxfed ,

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.

droans ,

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.

0110010001100010 ,
@0110010001100010@lemmy.world avatar

🎻

Ep1cFac3pa1m ,
@Ep1cFac3pa1m@lemmy.world avatar

“Return to office!”

Why?

“Because otherwise these buildings we bought are worthless!”

Ok, hard pass.

KoboldCoterie ,
@KoboldCoterie@pawb.social avatar

“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.”

AbidanYre ,

That’d be a lot easier with some sort of collective group that could make such a deal.

maynarkh ,

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.

edgemaster72 ,
@edgemaster72@lemmy.world avatar

You want to bargain collectively? Presenting a united front? What would you even call such a thing?

snooggums ,
@snooggums@kbin.social avatar

"Socialism!"

Nougat ,

I just realized something. Making people work in expensive office buildings is how the rich extract more wealth from the working class.

How can I get more money? Start a business! Perfect. Now how can I get more money from that? Well ... If I owned an office building, then I could rent office space to the business. But what is the business going to do with an office building? Ohhhh, the business, that I own, or am the majority shareholder in, the business in which I make all the decisions, could decide that employees have to come into the office. That I rent to the business, because I own the office building.

ultranaut ,

There’s also the businesses nearby that serve the workers in the office building. Supposedly one of the reasons Amazon has pushed so hard on RTO is a lot of their executives have personal investments in those businesses and without Amazon workers in the area they were taking in way less money. When you happen to own the restaurant across the street it’s in your interest to force your coworkers back into the office.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

Interest rates were so low for so long, people tried to find other ways to grow their money.

Hey you want to borrow what is essentially free money to buy a building in charge tenants? It’s a safe investment, right, there’s no reason why businesses would stop needing office space, right,…right right.

And of course it goes deeper than that too. Even if a company doesn’t have any real skin in the game as far as owning The real estate, shutting down the offices makes for some colossal problems. If your stuff’s not already in the cloud you need to migrate everything. It changes secure networks, where do you meet with clients, when you don’t have that huge beautiful branded space with a magnificent mahogany table in your conference room how do you impress your clients? Where do you have your new hardware shipped? Does your IT team now just store hundreds of thousands of dollars of hardware in their house? How much are you going to lose when you auction off all the furniture?

This of course can all be overcome and answered but it’s not easy. It’s also not easily reversible.

Most of management cares a lot less that people are working from home and cares a lot more about having to decommission the actual offices because it’s strategic and financial nightmare fuel.

KoboldCoterie ,
@KoboldCoterie@pawb.social avatar

The company I work for reduced our office space from 3 floors of the building to 1, started leasing out the other two, and now maintains only a few conference rooms for client meetings and similar functions, the server rooms and IT space, and a very small set of communal workspaces for people who want or need to work from the office.

Point being, there’re always options less extreme than “Sell the entire building!”.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

We’re in a larger building we don’t own. Keeping one floor for the 5 people a week that come in is kinda insane. We need to move, but it’s a shit sandwich, place is beautiful,

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

How does buying and renting an expensive office building to yourself extract wealth from the working class?

Grayox ,
@Grayox@lemmy.ml avatar

Because it is paid for with labor value that was stolen from the working class.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

I don’t understand what this means?

JoBo ,

Because they have to spend a fortune on rent and/or commuting to earn a living where all the jobs are.

Not forgetting that is is bosses who make the location decisions and they can afford to buy in those hugely expensive cities while the forced influx of workers pushes the price of housing up.

Companies should be taxed based on the in-work benefits required to make their location viable, regardless of their own wage structure.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Because they have to spend a fortune on rent and/or commuting to earn a living where all the jobs are.

And this benefits the business/property owner how?

The proposed strategy doesn’t do anything except cost everyone more money.

JoBo ,

Unless you’ve invested in property in the city you’re forcing everyone into.

Fedizen ,

it raises the productivity requirements of the business to exist without actually returning any of the same money to the pockets of workers. Its similar to your boss owning your apartment and billing you for rent. You work harder, make less money and your boss makes more.

Its why there should be limits on the creation of shell companies and real estate trusts.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

it raises the productivity requirements of the business to exist

I don’t understand what this means? You mean the business has to make more money to pay the rent? Why would that obligation be necessary to “increase productivity requirements?”.

Fedizen ,

yes the business has to sell more product to rent a place than buy it, generally. This is why venture capital often does exactly this when they buy a corporation - they seperate all the real estate to a shell company and raise rents, which lowers profits for the original company forcing managers to try to extract more from workers to maintain profits and prevent closures.

I want to say this is exactly what happened to albertsons and the cut that gets made is a reduction in wage increases.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

which lowers profits for the original company forcing managers to try to extract more from workers to maintain profits and prevent closures.

That makes no sense. Why would you fabricate running costs of a business that the employees or managers will never see or care about?

If they sold these properties and these costs suddenly disappeared, are managers going to suddenly allow their employees to slack off because they “don’t need” that much money? No. There’s no such thing as “enough money” in a corporate environment.

This sounds a whole lot like a made-up conspiracy theory.

Fedizen ,

So explain why this is one of the many things Cerberus did after it bought albertsons-safeway and one of the resulting actions taken was to axe the pension program?

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

I can’t. I don’t know anything about that.

Fedizen ,

so why call people conspiracy theorists?

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Because your explanation makes no sense

Fedizen ,

Yet it describes a real scenario that exists.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Maybe you’d like to explain it?

Fedizen ,

My understanding: In the case of Cerberus they wanted the original company to look less profitable’ Afaik this is one of many accounting trick to make the portion of the business with the most negotiable costs (such as labor) as unprofitable as possible on paper so they can justify things like pension cuts. By splitting it up it obfuscates the finances to the unions and gives a negotiating advantage without really damaging investor profits and they can then sell the now more risky corporation off while keeping the real estate as part of their portfolio.

Like its not always this blatant and there’s also some tax incentives and other things mixed in there but overall the goal of most businesses since the 80s is to move more money from wages —> profits. If they can consolidate the market a little as well, that’s bonus. “Competition is sin” after all.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Or maybe don’t return to office and then they can sell the building and recover some lost equity?

JoBo ,

Dangerously close to pulling a Shapiro there.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

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.

JoBo ,

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?

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

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.

JoBo ,

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.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Who’s going to pay $1 for an underwater home? No, these things are not alike.

JoBo ,

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.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Or they can just be sold to other employers who actually need them?

JoBo ,

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.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Some employers do, some don’t. Maybe new businesses come along that need office space but couldn’t previously afford it.

JoBo ,

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.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Yeah, I know, I stated that in my original comment.

hansl ,

You can reuse commercial buildings for other things (like residential sky rise). You cannot reuse underwater homes.

JoBo ,

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.

corsicanguppy ,

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.

Trollception ,

Lucky they found a buyer

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