Article is from 2025, and "extend and pretend" is coming unglued.[1]
Extend and pretend was big around 2024.[2]
The other side of this is that landlords hate to reduce rent to rent vacant spaces because their paying tenants will demand rent reductions or move. That can crash the rental market. A building half rented at rent X is more profitable than a building fully rented at rent 0.5 X.
This just says that they have too much power and society would be better off having a vacancy tax that aimed to reduce abuse by landlords while at the same time ensuring the city doesn't look like post crisis Detroit, which makes it worse for everyone.
Where I live (NC, USA) there was a big issue where commercial property owners have been able to reduce their property tax assessments, not on the basis of 'comparable sales' (like everyone else), but on the basis of the income derived from the property.
I can't say how widespread this practice actually is, but it's not unheard of. Apparently property tax rules are going to vary widely by jurisdiction, which country / which state or province / etc.
There’s one thing you can guarantee in America. If it puts the interests of high income people vs everyday income people, the policies favoring the rich will almost always win out.
It would be absolute stupidity for a property owner to keep a property vacant solely to reduce the property tax assessment. Certainly there are some stupid rich people... but I doubt that the majority are that stupid. There must be some other explanation.
Not the same because it does not depend on utilisation. Pretty much everywhere you see property taxes, but vacancy taxes are a lot more recent and I guess rare so far.
The city doesn't want commercial real estate values to collapse either, since buildings are taxed based on their value. If extend and pretend is ending, tax revenues are about to take a nosedive.
The city is better off having its citizens participate more in the economy and paying taxes through it than staying home or not starting business because rent is too high.
Not necessarily. That's what's best for the city as in a geographical area where people live. What's best for the city as in an organisation with bureaucrats and finances is probably whatever increases revenues.
> The other side of this is that landlords hate to reduce rent to rent vacant spaces because their paying tenants will demand rent reductions or move.
That too is a "it depends". For a failing mall, getting anyone into the empty spaces starts to become important to the other tenants because anything that draws people into the mall is a potential customer. Customers will even no shop you just because they know there is nothing else in the mall. Thus some malls near me have museums and the like inside - anything to get traffic.
> A building half rented at rent X is more profitable than a building fully rented at rent 0.5 X.
That's assuming rents would decrease by half, and also that it's still half occupied. A building half rented at X isn't more profitable than a building fully rented at 0.7 X. A building 25% rented at X isn't more profitable than a building fully rented at 0.5 X.
If the space is commercial, it's more valuable for the tenants. More traffic, more random sales opportunities. If half-occupied, it looks like a ghetto, and they only get deliberate traffic.
I was told capitalism made for efficient use of resources.(inb4 oh you sweet summer child)
If the land isnt being used efficiently the owning entity should fail and a new productive use made.
Whether thats tearing it down for the public to get better use of the land; rerouting roads, community swimming pool, park etc. Replacing with a more economic building; factory, stadium, appartments (zoning not withstanding). Or a more productive entity getting use of it.
Bagholders being entrenched and protected are becoming a weight around the neck
This explanation seems very implausible to me. By lowering the rent by X%, and therefore reducing annual revenue by X%, you admit the building is worth X% less. But by leaving the building X% vacant, also reducing the annual income stream by X%, you and the bank can somehow pretend the building is worth what it would be if full? I doubt owners and banks actually believe this. Is there some policy that forces this?
The policy is spelled out in the article? Banks have strict regulations that mean they have to have a certain amount of capital backing loans, and by revaluing a building you lower the capital that backs the loan, thus raising its risk, and thus leading you to break the regulation around capital requirements.
It's not a question of what the banks believe, but rather what they believe officially. As long as they keep pretending the loss doesn't need to get accounted for.
The argument the article makes is that the bank doesn't want to admit the property is worth less than the mortgage because then they would "have to" foreclose.
The question is, why would they actually do that? The premise is that the landlord has to take out a new mortgage every few years and then the bank won't give them a new one if they're underwater. But that's only true if it's a different bank.
Let's take the same example. Building was expected to be worth $20M, landlord pays $4M down and takes a $16M interest-only mortgage. The only thing the bank ever expected from this was to collect interest on the $16M until it's paid back, which could be never and that's fine as long as they get to keep collecting interest.
Then we find out the building is maybe really only worth $14M. But the landlord is still making the interest payments on the $16M, and over time it will likely become worth more than $16M again due to inflation if nothing else, so why does the bank need to foreclose? The risk that they could "lose $2M" is by that point a sunk cost. It's the thing that happens if they do foreclose (or fail to renew the loan). They'd be calling in the note against an LLC that owns nothing but a building which is now estimated to be worth less than the loan principal. So the obvious thing would be to keep renewing it as long as the landlord continues to make the interest payments.
This feels like some kind of regulatory inefficiency or accounting scam where the bank is listing the mortgage lien as an asset and would have to take a write off if they valued it accurately and therefore transfer their perverse incentive to the landlord to prevent that from happening.
Notice however that doing that also hurts the bank. The landlord is collecting $500k/year at half occupancy, then paying the bank $640k and losing $140k/year to try to avoid the total loss of their $4M initial investment. Maybe they can do that for a year or three but the longer it continues the higher the probability that they run out of money. Whereas if they were collecting the $700k/year from renting out the entire building at lower rents then they could keep paying the bank its $640k/year forever, regardless of whether they're technically underwater. And if the landlord runs out of money then the bank has to take the $2M write off because they get a $14M building instead of collecting interest on a $16M loan. So the bank is really shooting itself in the foot.
Not if the economy actually does recover, or at least "looks" like it recovered on paper. Inflation helps with that.
The average inflation over the last 10 years has been just north of 3%. If you have tenants today that are paying $500k/year, in 10 years they should be paying almost $700k/year with 50% occupancy. If you can string the bank along for another loan then your valuation is $28M instead of $20M. As the owner you can effectively take money out in this scenario.
If the bank won't refinance at that rate, then you could lower your rents by a bit in the last year. If you lowered your rates back down to $500k/year then you invite a bunch of new tenants, and now you can show high occupancy again.
But how does it help the bank to require that? Suppose the landlord lowered rents to raise occupancy so they could get $700k now instead of after several years of inflation. If all goes according to plan then the bank gets its interest payments either way, and then the landlord would be making $900k with full occupancy instead of $700k with half occupancy.
But if the value doesn't recover then the landlord is still only getting $500k while paying $640k at the point when they run out of money to pay their $140k annual loss, and then they default. Which they wouldn't do, even if the value never recovers, if they were allowed to make $700k by lowering rents.
The problem is the bank didn’t leave a buffer to meet their requirements, so arbitrage between reality and official reality comes to the rescue.
If a bank only loaned 60% of a buildings value, it could be devalued, the operator would eat the shortfall, but the bank could reappraise, with the loan continuing as before.
[So a regulation setting a banks maximum loan percentage, at a percentage less than they are required to maintain, is an obvious regulatory fix.]
However, another way to look at this from a banks point of view is while they may loan 80%, they might have been happy to loan 100% but for regulations. So perversely, they may not be as concerned about this happening as it appears.
For them, the 80% max loan is already providing a buffer, in terms of the risk they would be happy to take. So if they can avoid acknowledging they have loans that have risen in percentage terms, it is in their business interest to encourage, facilitate, giving operators breathing room.
And in the meantime, inflation, property value growth, and future demand increases provide three statistically “expected” ways for the situation to self-correct over time.
For financial investment products, all value is “expected” value.
And the operator may not be losing money, so much as paying for the buildings accrued value growth. Which would be a wash, but avoids the practical problems of defaults. Not the best, but not losing (as much) money as it appears.
And for the bank, if the loan payments are made there is no problem.
So there are two hidden buffers: banks willingness to loan more than regulators want them to, and natural property value increases, lowering rent prices (i.e. inflation) over time.
> The problem is the bank didn’t leave a buffer to meet their requirements
They did though. It was a $20M building and they only loaned out $16M, providing a $4M buffer. It isn't possible to require an amount that the value of the building could never fall below under any circumstances because that would require the loan amount to be zero. It's always possible for the value of the property to crash, e.g. it becomes contaminated with toxic waste and the remediation costs more than the property value, or the area's major employer shuts down and the area becomes a ghost town.
Meanwhile increasing the size of the buffer has costs that can exceed the value of a larger buffer, i.e. fewer people can afford a mortgage, which is both economically bad and not in the interests of the bank who wants to make more loans rather than fewer.
> However, another way to look at this from a banks point of view is while they may loan 80%, they might have been happy to loan 100% but for regulations.
The reason banks require a down payment instead of loaning out 100% of the value of the property is definitely because the banks want the buffer to not be zero.
> And for the bank, if the loan payments are made there is no problem.
But that's the issue. If they prevent the landlord from lowering rents to increase occupancy then they may not be able to make the payments anymore, and then the bank is screwed.
> They did though. It was a $20M building and they only loaned out $16M, providing a $4M buffer
The problem is the bank is regulated to only maintain loans at 80% of property value or lower.
If they give a loan at the maximum allowable level, they don't have a (legal) buffer.
Thus the strong incentive to perform creative bookkeeping, to avoid having to repossess property they don't want. Instead of simply recognizing the falling property value in their accounting, which without a forced call, is the property owners loss, not theirs.
The whole goal is not to write off the value of the property which you have to do if you rent it for less money than initially planned. That's not that difficult to understand is it?
I mean, it's highly unintuitive, which I would say makes it difficult to understand. The main weirdness is that lowering the rent would force a revaluation whereas letting the building sit vacant for an extended period of time apparently would not. If this is truly driven by regulatory capital requirements, then it seems like a gap in the regulations.
Also foreclosure generally isn't the only option: the borrower could, for example, agree to repay part of the loan early, or give extra collateral, both of which would increase the LTV (and this would be better for the bank).
I'm not saying the explanation is wrong, but I don't blame people for finding it difficult to understand. Other factors contributing to this are probably borrower relationships/negotiating strength and the high costs associated with foreclosing.
Banks care that you pay their loan first and foremost, how you do that as the borrower is up to you.
They care about the regulatory requirements in so far as you either meet it, or you don’t at the time of writing a loan. And maybe you get a yearly review.
Also people are looking at this in a very isolated view. Just because a building is vacant doesn’t mean the owner has no other option than just lower the rent. Typically owners of commercial property own multiple properties and various other types of assets. Vacancy rates are also built into calculations.
They are extending loans though. In a normal market, requesting an extension when the bank knows you're underwater should set off some risk alarm bells and trigger a denial. The "normal person" intuition about how loans work is correct here: if I try to refi my house when it's underwater and I've lost my income, the bank denies the refi. That incentivizes me to do what it takes to make the bank whole, or, make the appropriate decision to leave my house and let someone else who can afford it take over payments.
When everyone, the regulator, the operator, and the bank, are whistling a tune, when the whole sector is fucked, everyone has a big problem. How big? About as big as hundreds of buildings in the downtown of every major city sitting half-empty!
That's a pretty big problem. Maybe not as large as 08 but definitely structural. We're all paying indirectly for this office space to sit empty, instead of being able to use it.
I recommend getting out there and getting involved - it's surprisingly easy to end up talking to the actual owners of these buildings, and they're more often than not just a guy and not some weird conglomerate REIT and they'll make a deal but they'll also tell you what and why - listen!
I have the capacity to pay someone to dig a hole and fill it in. Would that be a wise use of my resources?
We're talking about the whole sector here, not one borrower. Huge swathes of commercial real estate are sitting empty, that's a big ongoing problem for everyone whether the loans are being serviced or not.
Dig and fill away dear fellow, that's what this site does best.
The whole sector doesn't have a vacancy problem. And it's not a problem for the banks nor the owners if they're servicing their loans. Sure they're not making money but that's not your or anyone else's problem either.
Commercial leases are often for say 5+5 years, so once you lock it in, you know for sure what the property revenue is going to be for the next so many years. Your uncertainty equation has collapsed.
I think the main insight here is that commercial real estate is an entirely different animal than the residences that you may be used to.
You can apply this same reasoning to the "back to the office" pushes done on behalf of the institutional investors who have exposure to large commercial properties in inner cities. That too is a financial house of cards built on assumptions and vibes.
Nobody said commercial real estate was risk free free money in some abstract financial product, other than the doofus who wrote this long "note." The hard fact is these are real buildings in real places that aren't really fungible at all. So it seems kind of ridiculous that CRE investors should be insulated from every possible externality. Obviously the right thing to do is to tax vacant properties, and then we shall see how many stay vacant and how many foreclosures there are (hint: owners suddenly find capital and are able to pay the tax or rent things out and nothing ever gets foreclosed in every one of these scenarios where it actually happens).
i think you are on the first step of the journey to seeing that neither math nor maximizing $ is the solution to all problems. it's not even the solution to most problems.
What is being missed is that most commercial leases are much longer term than residential leases. Businesses will want to renovate the space and sign a 10 or 20 year lease. So if you lower the rent by 30% you will really be reducing the income of the building over the long term and face those consequences when refinancing. Landlords will frequently try to rent out unused space to temporary tenants like popups or non profits that they can move in without renovation and kick our on shorter notice to generate some cash-flow and keep the storefront occupied.
At some point, you don't need to stand on the scales for it to be obvious you are a fat bastard. Ditto, it's obvious to all that commercial property has lost a huge amount of value.
I suggest that like the dotcom/2008/AI bubbles, people will just keep dancing and making money until reality catches up and the music stops.
> Keeping it vacant only impact current income, lowering rent impacts future forecasts.
Does it though? Suppose you can't find a tenant right now because the market is soft but is predicted to improve in a few years. If you leave the unit vacant, you lose money right now. If you rent it out with e.g. a 3-year lease, you make more for the next 3 years than you would with a vacancy, and if the market price has increased by then you can increase the rent on the unit and either get it from the current occupant or the one you get to replace them in the high demand market when the higher rent causes the low-paying tenant to not renew the lease.
So taking a tenant now only improves prospects (you fill a current vacancy) with no negative impact on future returns. The only thing it does is imply that current rents are lower than before and future rents might be too, but a vacancy implies that even more strongly.
it's because the expected future income is based on what current tenants are paying, extrapolated to the number of units in the building, ignoring vacancies. I get what you are saying, it should be based on total rental income from the building - full stop - but that isn't how it is done, and this is the result.
Simply stated, if you rent a new unit for 25% lower, then the value of the building just dropped 25%. If you don't rent to a new tenant, your value must be the same, that's what the existing tenants are paying (not that I agree with this, it's just how it works right now).
It's similar to how people holding low liquidity assets will claim they are "worth" whatever the last person who paid for this assert, even if the real value of it is dropped, the "book value" is still sky high.
> but that isn't how it is done, and this is the result.
And the result is dumb, which is the point. The bank should stop doing that if they don't want to cause problems for themselves.
Review again how this works. The landlord put in $4M and the bank $16M on what was supposed to be a $20M building. They can't find enough tenants, which means in real life it's only worth $14M and the incumbent system is for everybody to pretend that isn't the case when it really is.
As a result, the landlord is collecting $500k in net rent instead of the $700k they could get by lowering rents and getting more tenants, while paying the bank $640k/year in interest. The landlord does this because if the value of the building eventually recovers then they don't lose their initial $4M investment, whereas if they hand over the keys to the bank it's definitely gone. And even if that money was gone, they'd still want to keep operating the building if they were at least turning any annual profit instead of making continuous losses.
This is bad for the landlord (they lose $140k/year instead of making $60k/year) and it's even worse for the bank, because now if the landlord runs out of cash or concludes the value of the building isn't going to recover, the bank has to eat a $2M loss by foreclosing instead of continuing to collect $640k in interest every year, which they could have done indefinitely if the landlord was allowed to keep renewing the loan while making more money by lowering rents and increasing occupancy.
Worse, this is happening at scale. If landlords could lower rents without getting foreclosed on then banks would keep getting their interest payments until inflation catches up to the nominal amount of the mortgage. But if the landlords are required to keep taking a loss, they eventually start to give up -- the article implies that they don't want to give up until the annual loss eats the original $4M, but it really happens as soon as they think the value of the building isn't going to recover. But that's only a problem for the bank if they default on the mortgage, which they do if keeping it makes them lose $140k/year but not if it's still earning them $60k/year. And that's especially a problem for the banks if it happens not just at all but all at once.
That's the trick, isn't it, though? Rationally it's especially a problem if it happens all at once, but realistically if your bank has an awful quarter then you're at fault whereas if every bank has an awful quarter then no one's at fault, it's a systemic issue, chances are you get to collect a bail out and keep going. It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma, a critical mass of banks needs to defect and each individual bank's incentive is to cooperate.
If my wife and I are at the airport, and the gate agent offers me (and only me) an upgrade on the flight, your logic says I should take it since that's strictly better than both of us flying economy.
> If my wife and I are at the airport, and the gate agent offers me (and only me) an upgrade on the flight, your logic says I should take it since that's strictly better than both of us flying economy.
This has happened many times to me - the answer is to take it and give the upgrade to your traveling companion if you are the one who flies a lot.
> Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her...In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself
Too many people ignore this part of that "submit yourselves to your husbands" quote.
For those of us who think of themselves as Christian, I think sitting in a less comfortable seat is probably small potatoes to what Christ did on the cross.
Just throwing out some biblical ideas here. I know there are a lot of other perspectives.
Business tenants know perfectly well that when it comes time to renew a commercial lease and local rents have increased, the renewal rent is going to approximate the current market price.
The landlord doesn't want you to to leave but only to the extent that finding a new tenant costs more than the discount against the current market price they'd have to give you to stay.
A three year lease locks in the lower revenue. If the market recovers tomorrow you can have the full price for nearly as long.
But I'm not convinced the risk-reward calculation fully explains it. You can see plenty of places where they know full well it's not going to rent at the price they're asking. I think there are other factors, including not letting your other high-lease tenants think that they're now occupying a low-rent establishment.
Your jewelry store would rather not suddenly be next to a cheapo nail salon. And if you've got a third property to lease, the high-fashion brand looking at it will see the nail salon and move on.
This is the same reason in housing market where landlords let their property sit empty instead of accepting lower rent. There is a perception that lower rents attract problem tenants and it’s not worth the headache even if that means losing money.
> Does it though? Suppose you can't find a tenant right now because the market is soft but is predicted to improve in a few years.
You'd need perfect information to make a contractual decision on that, and it still has lasting effects.
For instance imagine renting your floors to Pornhub for these 3 years on the cheap because the market it low. Assuming you made the right calculation and demand recovers 3 years later, you'll have to first kick out the company (= months spent restoring it), then try to convince the insurance company that eyes at your building that they should pay a hiked price to move into Pornhub's previous floors.
And that's assuming you haven't completely blown it where the market actually recovers within 6 months for reasons nobody anticipated.
But that just means the bank is creating deliberately delusional forecasts.
I can build a building that charges a billion dollars a month rent, and sits completely empty. A forecast suggestion I'll be making hundreds of billions with no renters is clearly silly.
"Last value" is pretty meaningless when it's stale though.
Suppose there is a building that was built in 1970, last rented out in 1975 and then bought by a company that has used it as their own offices until now. The last transaction was in 1975, what's the value if they apply for a mortgage today? Surely they have some formula to use for this based on e.g. other buildings in the area.
Moreover, "failure to find a tenant" is also a type of transaction. It's the landlord acting as the high bidder for the space, essentially the involuntary edition of imputed rent, and implies something negative about the financial prospects of the building when it continues for a significant period of time or large percentage of units. Ignoring that it is either incompetence or some kind of perverse incentive.
> "Last value" is pretty meaningless when it's stale though.
For who and in what way though? Every entity involved wants to keep the price high, except the renter/new buyer, so with that in mind, "Last Value" seems optimal for achieving that.
Maybe it's different in the US, but in Spain there is a ton of properties that sit completely empty and unused, even since earlier than 2008, just because the owners don't think the value is enough to sell yet, and they wouldn't earn enough renting it out, so everyone (except renters/new buyers) seems to prefer it just sits empty for decades.
Suppose the building is supposed to be worth $20M, has an existing $10M mortgage and is actually only worth $10M. The landlord comes to you and wants to borrow another $5M against the building. Pretty important to the lender at this point that they're not overvaluing it, right? Or the same if they go to a different bank trying to refinance an existing mortgage they're already underwater on when using an accurate accounting.
It's not a matter of whether I like it. It's a question of why the bank, unless required to do so by some kind of absurd perverse regulatory incentive, would do something which is not only harming others but also increasing the default risk for the bank by reducing the income of a borrower who, if they can't make the payments, will cause the bank to have to write off millions of dollars by foreclosing on an underwater building.
You’re also assuming every vacancy has this pigeon holed financial setup. A LOT of commercial property is freehold.
I’m honestly at a bit of a loss that people feel they can tell others what to do with their property because it’s vacant. That’s not how society works, and it won’t change to that either.
if the society decides that they don't want properties to stay empty, then that's exactly how it works. and yes, it will change to that if people want it. german cities are already discussing options how to motivate owners to fill their properties through various incentives including legal ones.
When people are fulfilling their obligations and most other people are not happy with the outcome, that usually means the definition of "obligations" is wrong.
Not sure what you mean. The goal is a good society. Allowing certain individuals to keep certain things they currently have was never any part of my goal. (I can't speak for others in the thread of course.)
I picture the banks and the landlords would do better in the long term too if the shops were full.
This is not Bluesky leftist "let's take Jeff Bezos' yacht so we can all have 15 minutes of health insurance" but rather "let's have more businesses in this town that can put capital to work, create jobs, create wealth and the kind of consumer choice that Ralph Nader and Ludwig von Mises both agreed on."
There are buildings in my town that haven't been used in 20-30 years. And that's in the 'modern' shopping area. In the old 'downtown' area there are some that have been empty for 40+ years.
There's a building near my office. Never technically finished so empty for 10+ years. I believe the two owners had a disagreement.
One day a crew turns up and starts jack hammering away a gangway. Its technically now two buildings; one of them is still unfinished and empty, the other has now been finished and is up for rent.
In terms of my utility I would prefer things renovated, changed, or rented out to funky things than have ghastly empty buildings
This sounds like the worst case outcome for society; real estate permanently allotted to some entity that chooses not to use it. It is not an envious model; it is a model that should be eliminated.
“You” require a continuous analysis of cash flow to continuously determine value, and proper management. A simple, and common, requirement in commercial lending called the debt service coverage ratio.
Lower income for the building means lower numerator, which means being unable to meet the agreed upon DSCR, which means default. Whether or not the lender acts on this default is a separate matter, as they are usually loathe to get into the property management business, but renegotiation of terms and eventually foreclosure does happen.
Actual commercial real estate professionals could give you many more reasons than I can
I am so tired of listening to people with little to no experience with commercial real estate try and explain the vacant storefront thing. Maybe this explanation in the article is correct, but it raises more questions than it answers, and it’s unclear why we should trust this person’s explanation.
they already gave their explanation. if you disagree then it is on you to provide a counter argument otherwise anyone could just shoot down any argument by claiming that it has no merit.
at best you could say that you do not find the argument convincing, but even then you should explain why. you are not even claiming that the argument in question is wrong, you are only questioning the credentials of the author. that's appeal to authority, and therefore not a valid argument. https://youtu.be/N5k4yUSPHI8
I don't know much about microbiology, but that shouldn't stop me from asking someone who "did their own research" to shut up and let the experts talk.
yes it should, unless you can provide a convincing argument that the person is wrong, expert or not.
on the internet anyone can claim to be an expert and nobody can prove it.
Oh my goodness, thank you. My wife had to move her store in 2020 in the midst of lockdown; you'd think rents would have been low, but no. Since then, many of the places that wouldn't lower the rent then, have sat empty ever since. This is in Austin, TX, a town that has had a healthy economy during that entire time.
Weirder still, many of them were on the market, theoretically for rent, but if you called them up it turned out they weren't actually available, and the landlord wasn't interested in renting them. I couldn't figure out why you would pretend something was for rent at $X, and let it sit empty for years, rather than actually rent it at something <$X. Now it makes sense.
Wait, were they not available at $x, or not available for < $x? Because if it’s the former, then this article doesn’t really explain your experience, right?
Could be this (from the article): "Another scenario I can think of is that the financial model for the building requires spaces to be filled by “credit tenants,” meaning name-brand businesses of a certain caliber and creditworthiness."
Might not be available unless your name ends in 'tarbucks'.
Yep. The owner assigns much higher value to leasing to a large national chain. They often hold out for one, refusing to lease to more risky businesses.
Another thing that I read about on this topic was that once a land lord has gotten into a groove of extend and pretend they lower their costs and cut out the overhead of property management. This means that if they took on one tenant they would have to ramp up property management costs (and potentially refurb/improvement costs) and they are not willing to do that, so you end up with the situation where you can't rent a property even if you want to.
Several instances of both. In at least one case they told us that they wanted to rent to a big-name tenant at a larger space in the same complex, before they started renting any of the smaller places. What seemed odd to me is that they would nonetheless put the property "on the market", i.e. online listing, even though if you called up they would say it's not for rent. I figured it had to be to claim that it was "available for rent" in some technical sense, but I didn't know why.
In others they would just have too high a price, and it is still empty six years later so they are clearly not unaware that they have it priced too high. Simple math showed they would be better off renting at a lower price than going years without anything, but it was quite common so it didn't seem like it could be simple stupidity.
The test, I guess, of this explanation is whether or not the flow of money out of private credit causes the end of "extend and pretend", and the market finally clears.
The key analysis is how does the system manage the risk that a building's equilibrium rent goes down or turns out to be lower than assumed when writing the loan.
The system described in the article is basically that the risk is not explicitly planned for, and just washes out that it is managed by a vacancy and building owners eating the cost of the vacancy.
Any solution needs to provide a new answer for how that risk is managed, preferably one that doesn't result in foreclosures. Some possibility:
* The bank takes on the risk, by loans having a provision for writing down value if rents have to drop. This is tricky, because if the operator decides when rents need to be revised down, they have no incentive to protect the bank's position. If the bank decides, then they have no incentive to ever accept a rent drop, they'd rather force the operator to eat the vacancy. You'd need some trigger like duration of vacancies.
* The operator takes on the risk but with a mechanism for lowering the rent. I can't really figure out a way this would work without requiring the operator to have capital on hand though.
* The risk is insured. If rents need to drop then insurance pays the write-down in property value. I'm not sure any insurance company would be able to take this business though, as it is highly correlated between customers. A downturn would just wipe-out the insurer.
How come this obvious workaround isn't used much more often:
>> If the system allows you to pretend that the vacancy is temporary, why doesn’t it allow you to lower rents on the pretense that lower rents are also temporary?
> This does happen sometimes: it’s packaged as “incentive offers,” like 50% off the first 12 or 24 months rent, or 6 months without rent, etc, that lower the average rent over the life of the lease without lowering the “list price.” That’s common in residential leases, and I know it happens sometimes in commercial leases, but I don’t know how prevalent it is.
It is worth noting that the reason they are pretending is almost certainly because of regulatory demands - if it were just between the bank and the owner they'd agree to do what is in both of their best interests - rent the space out at market rates. If there is a market-based 3rd party involved they will figure out that the bank is playing games and start acting whether or not the bank officially recognises the losses. Surely only a regulator or other similar heavily law-bound body would tolerate this sort of sillyness.
So as a blind guess, it probably depends on how legal incentive offers are. The axis being optimised here will be what the regulatory bodies can tolerate before they start handing out fines and punishments.
Ah. That makes sense. Maybe the polite fiction would clash too obviously with accounting standards once the (de facto) lowered rent payments roll in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48567769
Could the situation be improved then if financial regulators started treating both versions ("temporary" vacancy / "temporarily" lowered rent) equally? Tolerate both or crack down on both.
I agree. I see a lot of comments alluding to the 'regulations' being bad. They are there for a reason. To keep errant bankers from loaning out too much money and creating an even more fragile system.
People have to realize that banking as a business is inherently broken. It is about lending long and borrowing short, which is very risky. Deposits are used to provide funds to lend long, but deposits can be 'called' at any time. The loans cannot.
But banking is also critical for a properly functioning society. It is in the government's (the people's) best interest to have a robust banking system in place. How to reconcile the risk with the benefit? By heavily regulating it.
Say what you want, but a law that lets you pretend that the value of a building is based on what you ask, rather than what you can actually obtain, is a stupid law.
What is a better option? Before your answer, remember it sometimes really is the case that the economy is down and in two years things will recover and everything will rent out again. Your answer needs to smooth that out.
Rolling average including vacant months as $0? And if that isn't smooth enough, add some smoothing factor, count vacant months as 10% of the last paid value, or maybe the first vacant month as 50% with further months decaying. Or some other fancy accounting that makes more sense than the current method.
"remember it sometimes really is the case that the economy is down and in two years things will recover and everything will rent out again"
Where do we draw the line between reality and fantasy then? If the terms of a deal are not reflecting the reality of the moment (i.e. the office rent market demand quotes) but some figure people come up with on their own, then let's call it what it is -- gambling (in which case it should be treated as such).
Not caring is why we are in this place where rent doesn't go down. Now, maybe it is really is not your problem, but be aware that it is a problem for someone and in turn, you can raise your costs if you are shopping at those businesses. If financials doesn't pencil out, then either the business closes or they raise prices.
> Not caring is why we are in this place where rent doesn't go down.
Not sure what you mean. What I mean is that I am fine with policies that effectively force the building owner to lower the rent (if their net worth is high enough) even if it means they take a loss, because I am fine with forcing people with lots of money to take losses. So the rent will go down.
I actually think there's a business to be had here.
As described, the landlord can't offer a traditional lease for the actual value of the space.
However, the landlord could offer essentially day rentals without creating a lease. There are systems for this already, such as Peerspace and their ilk, which I've used for small events. I believe these don't trigger the foreclosure clauses.
I think that a property management company managing deeply underwater buildings could play in this, reducing their cost structure by offering day rates. They've often already got a solid NFC entry system. Most of what you need is automated pricing, onboarding and offboarding, and figuring out how you avoid needing physical cleaning/setup/teardown overhead.
I can't comment on that specific structure, but pop-up shops are one method that in the UK councils will often help vacant buildings with for exactly this reason, with the upside that they may convert into permanent tenants.
And the downside is loads of reasonably successful decent small shops in the UK now have to close after 12-24 months when the rents get jacked-up from sensible to astronomical levels. None of them become permeant tenants unless they are a front for money laundering (hence the explosion of nail bars and barbers on the UK high street) or illegal goods (dodgy vape shops).
Of course it is! But I don't think it's different in this way. Did you have a specific data point about a 12-24 month rental getting kicked out in order to prevent foreclosure?
I know regardless of the vacancy I would not consider day rates, I’d eat the loss and deal with the cashflow via other means. Consider what sort of fit out would be necessary for what’s lets be honest is being suggested - hot desking - compared to a standard office: lots of IT systems necessary, lots of additional security, lots more cleaning, and likely lots more repairs for wear & tear which probably isn’t recoverable easily.
I'm not suggesting hotdesking at all; you may have seen someone else's comments suggesting they thought that! My best example (provided in my original comment) was Peerspace, but there are many others like that. Zero infrastructural investment past giving someone a key (or setting up an HID reader and such).
I own both commercial and residential property. I have used the company I mentioned, but I'm not trying to advertise for them, I just know other examples exist.
I didn't install a reader, I provided a physical key copy. Readers make it slicker.
I haven't had any problems, most of my rentals have been for small events. They brought their own supplies, minus a few tables I provided.
Generally people renting space have no incentive to create a problem. They pay, I get paid, they want to take some pictures or get some people together.
Ha, cute, but no, very different. Wework is a tenant, and does significant buildouts. This would be "you can use the space for a few days or weeks".
I've seen companies provide some moveable furniture in a space like this - some desks, some extension cords - but it has to be up to the temporary user to configure and put things away when they're done.
Came here to say the same thing... A "building-sized financial product that incentivises extend and pretend" is fertile ground for an organised player like wework to "lease and sublet, except on a subscription basis".
viz. wework could apply the "single-use low-priced shampoo sachet" model [0] to SaaS-style rent-seeking of long-lived infrastructure. Infra. that is guaranteed to be always under-utilised... even in boom markets, because nothing functions at 100% capacity.
Adobe, as another example of (software) infrastructure --- i.e. traditionally, lifetime licence and ownership desktop software --- figured out their own "shampoo sachet" pricing. viz. how to make and ship desktop software product but kill-switch them with metered SaaS subscriptions.
The monthly price is just high enough to make gobs of cash for Adobe, while causing the typically-feast-and-famine freelancer to take the capitalist shellacking because it's just convenient enough. They can align software spends with active projects, and avoid the anxiety of cracked software doing nefarious things to their computers and data.
But over a long enough time, they pay Adobe a (presumably) huge premium over up-front priced software. And they stay locked into a planned obsolescence cycle controlled by Adobe... "The new version of your beloved editing software will only work with the latest Windoze which means hardware upgrade and oh, you have to do it because well we are soon kill-switching the current version you are dependent on."
Wework like operators can do exactly similar shenanigans with access to commercial infrastructure. Crowd out competition by aggressive long-term leasing on their buy-side, and on their sell-side build daily-subscription-dependency (buying ease, google-ish facilities which feeds into cult-and-status-signalling games), and convert a percentage of that into routine-subscription-dependency. Meanwhile also run rent-seeking games inside the main rent-seeking game... now you have a captive wallets who will buy the add-ons and extras because it's easier than walking two blocks for some cheaper and better alternative (e.g. food, coffee, lovely meeting space etc.).
edit: add reference for "daily sachet pricing".
[0] Buying less, more often: An evaluation of sachet marketing strategy in an emerging market
Has anyone here considered the cost of capital reserves required by the bank for holding this loan? Commercial loans used to be a 100% capital holding requirement, while HVCRE (High Volatility Commercial Real Estate) Loans carry 150% capital holding. So if a bank loans a building owner 100% of a 20 million dollar facility and it meets HVCRE requirements, the bank has to keep 30 million of capital in reserve for the chance of default. Even if the loan receives enough buyer downpayment or for some other reason becomes normal Commercial loan the bank has to hold 20 million in reserve capital for the loan. So you have to net the incentive of the cost of the capital held in reserve against the interest payment on the bank's balance sheet as an economic forcing against continuing to float the loan forever...
> Half empty, the building is only generating $500k per year in net income instead of $1M.
> Let’s imagine the owner lowers the rent by 30% to fill the building.
> Now, reality has proven the operator can only make $700k per year.
No. When the building sat half empty, reality had already proven that it could not generate what they thought it could.
This is the insane fallacy driving this whole thing, and no amount of explanations about commercial mortgages will prove anything other than that a larger number of people than we thought are participating in the same delusion. If you cannot rent the space for what you thought it could rent for, your building is already worth less than you thought, and it is sheer folly to think that you can alter that fact by pretending you are waiting for higher rent later.
> So, cities could do something like put a vacant storefront tax and… make them lose even more money? If that “worked,” the mechanism would be to force a lot of commercial property to default, which could put a lot of new space on the market at lower prices, which should lower the commercial rent. But it would also hurt the banks a lot, which has a history of leading to bad consequences and subsequent bailouts.
There is another problem. What we need is to dig deeper into that theory and push harder and harder for solutions where all the financial loss gets pushed onto the people at the top who have a lot of money. If the banks are making money off this kind of nonsense then they should fail.
> I’ll give this some more thought, but if any actual commercial real estate professionals have ideas I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
No! Commercial real estate professionals are mostly just more people buying into these same fallacies! What we need is more people outside that self-deluding system saying "this is nuts, I'm taking $100 million from you" and resetting the entire system.
> Let’s imagine the owner lowers the rent by 30% to fill the building.
Thought I'd comment with some concrete numbers. New buildings near me (West LA) are at $4100/month for a studio, where average rent in the area is $2300 for a studio, $2650 for a 1-bedroom. To fit in with "average" rent they'd need to lower 44% however 30% might be about right. Otherwise at 4% inflation wait 9 years? 1.04^9 = 1.42 ~ 100/(100 - 30).
The "problem" is that we let people claim the "rent" is X for certain people and "Y" for other people--both at the same time. Just stop that.
The "solution" is that you should have to pay tax on what you claim the rent is after a small grace period (Less than 24 months certainly. Probably less than 12 or at least prorated starting before that.).
If your financial agreement requires and claims that the rent is $5000, no problem! Then the tax authority should expect to receive the tax revenue they would expect if someone was actually paying $5,000 in rent to you. If you want to leave the space vacant even after paying the tax on the revenue--have a blast.
That would short circuit all the financialization shenanigans.
The article touches on vacancy takes, and I think this has a similar effect. As the article says, the even if you apply a tax like this, lowering the rent would still lead to foreclosure, so won't happen. So piling a tax on top might make some revenue, and it might make some operators go bust but it won't actually directly* get the property to be occupied.
* maybe if the operator goes bust, the rents on the building can be lowered with a new property value for future loans. Then perhaps it can be occupied. But that's very uncertain, especially if this happens to a whole city at once.
If the property is devalued, the property taxes lower accordingly. Portland, Oregon has been facing this problem recently. The devaluations caused the tax revenues for the city to drop, which in turn has caused budget issues.
For example, "Big Pink" is an office tower in downtown Portland. It's last sale was for about $370 million. Out of desperation in a saturated market, the owners sold it last year for about $45 million. No one - the owners, the city, or the citizens - wants to have the vicious downturn of values, and there is no easy solution. Adding a vacancy tax just exacerbates the problem.
As citizen I might prefer downturn of values. At least in medium term. Yes there is lot less tax income. But on other hand lowering values would mean lower rents which would mean lower overheads and potentially cheaper prices or more business being viable.
> Adding a vacancy tax just exacerbates the problem.
The point of the vacancy tax is also to prevent the over speculation before it happens. If the operators know that they are looking at having to cough up more cash than they expect in the future, they might reign in the rampant real estate speculation. If the bank knows that they might have to start coughing up cash, they'll be more inclined to actually just drop the property into bankruptcy.
Adding taxes in a downturn obviously adds additional friction. One might ask, what happened to the tax revenue of that $370M transaction, where is it now when the city needs it.
Somewhere in this chain are parties who are able to claim assets or collateral with values far in excess of actual market worth. To me that smells like the creditors are defrauding their counterparties.
The defrauded parties might include secondary lenders (to the property mortgage holders), regulators to whom financial instruments and solvency are being misrepresented, tenants who are paying higher-than-market rents, potential tenants who are denied market-rate rents on existing space, and arguably communities in which business and commercial opportunities are depressed due to the denial of access to real estate at market terms.
The operator of the building isn't the key point to fraud, as their interest (reducing rent to attract tenants) is actively thwarted by their creditors. The element of fraud is misrepresentation of true market value / income potential by projecting partial tenancy at elevated rates as if it were full tenancy, rather than the actual income stream at full occupancy (allowing for a nominal vacancy rate) at actually-supportable lease rates.
Yeah, I probably don’t mean fraud in the narrow criminal sense.
The thing that feels fraud-ish to me is that the loss doesn’t just disappear because nobody books it. A huge amount of capital and useful urban land is tied up preserving a fictional valuation and someone is paying for that somewhere.
Maybe it’s not a clean “X stole from Y” thing here, but it still means real businesses are displaced, worse downtowns, and less of the city that could have existed otherwise. I haven't seen this sort of thing as much in Australian cities where I'm from, but have a lot in the US where I live.
So maybe a better way phrasing "fraud on the public commons" is closer to what I mean. Everyone involved is probably acting rationally inside the system. The public still gets stuck living inside the dead space created by the fiction created by it and ends up eating that cost.
The value of a commercial building is based on the potential rent, not how much space is leased.
Loans can be called by the lender if the value of the collateral (building) falls too low.
Lowering rents lowers the building value. Not lowering rents and leaving spaces vacant ‘maintains’ the value of the building, as long as you can keeep making the loan payments everyone pretends the building is worth more money than it probably actually is. As long as the borrower keeps making payments to the lender, nobody really cares.
Seems to me that what is required to fix this is a complete overhaul of the valuation system and then tighter foreclosure protections, only foreclosing on defaults, more like residential real estate.
One element of this that I find interesting is that from the outside it can look somewhat like a decentralised monopoly given that it affects all (or most?) commercial rental properties; it looks like collusion to keep rents high. Where it's actually systemic to how commercial buildings are created in the first place: they do not account for a downturn, or at least a downturn on the scale that Covid wrought.
Store-fronts were already in decline due to 'internet shopping', but Covid probably brought a lot of physical close-down plans forward, such that any likelihood of recovery should be measured in decades or, more realistically, start being written off progressively to minimise a big hit down the track.
The longer extend and pretend lasts, the bigger the hit will be when it that strategy breaks.
I've seen a lot of this in Ithaca. They built a concrete parking garage with offices on the bottom level and for a long time it seemed like they'd only attract government offices. It took several years and they finally got a farm-to-table restaurant which is well regarded but possibly subsidized and in a category like government offices (e.g. no financial discipline about the rent)
There is a lot of talk that "there are excessive vacancies on the Ithaca Commons" but doesn't seem that bad except for the bottom of the first floor of Harold's Square, a market rate apartment development that was recently developed.
It could be 2 to 4 years to build the space. You can also structure the loan so the interest is amortized over a longer period than the loan which simply requires a balloon payment or refinancing of the interest balance at term which can offset some of the costs presented in this article.
It also does look like San Francisco has a vacant storefront tax although the penalties are fairly light.
Is this something there’s a federal lever for by forcing commercial loans to mark to market? So if I go to refi my $20M building and nothing is actually rented for 5 years, I can’t use list price and need to use market price for rent.
Or could be a shareholder lawsuit for banks as they are putting out riskier loans than the rate reflects?
I'm in Berlin where there's a glut of offices which are all sitting empty. I'm living next to a top line historic renovation/office space and it took them 8-9 years to complete the renovation at probably an astronomical cost and now it's been sitting empty for a year or so.
This financial model is also the main reason why it's so hard to convert these buildings to residential. Somebody has to eat the markdown.
> The obvious thing cities could try is to put more pressure on building operators to fill their spaces, but the building operators are already under a ton of pressure — they’re losing a bunch of money! So, cities could do something like put a vacant storefront tax and… make them lose even more money? If that “worked,” the mechanism would be to force a lot of commercial property to default, which could put a lot of new space on the market at lower prices, which should lower the commercial rent. But it would also hurt the banks a lot, which has a history of leading to bad consequences and subsequent bailouts.
I agree that this is the obvious remedy. I don't know if it's exactly the right answer, but it's the natural place to start the conversation, and I think it's at least in the ballpark of the right solution. It's the city (and bigger) government's job to create policies that incentivize the right behaviors for the benefit of the community. There clearly has been an oversight here, if extremely valuable commercial properties are literally just sitting unused for no good reason. In my opinion we'd all be better off if the market did correct itself, at least getting us all on the same page about what these properties are actually worth, rather than the current situation.
The city stepping in also helps put the fuckup back in the right place, in the hands of the property owners and lenders who seem to have made these bad bets, rather than externalized to the residents and business owners of the city, who haven't done anything wrong. The article suggests that this leads to "bad consequences" and even bank bailouts, but I'm pretty unconvinced that the problem is widespread enough that the federal government would literally need to start bailing out banks. From what I've seen, it's really bad in a few specific metro areas and not so much in others.
another possible remedy would be to find ways to change the conditions of the loan so that building owners can continue to pay off their loan at better rates that match the income they can make from rent.
Then you'll most likely get moral hazard. That is, rather of people acting in their own limits, as responsible business parties, they would instead be encouraged this way to make deals which they know won't be able to carry through, then after getting this metaphorical foot in the door, they'll expect "to change the conditions of the loan", i.e. beneficial intervention on their behalf (and a kind of bait-and-switch).
I'm not sure what the full elements of this are, but in a somewhat similar situation (Georgian Land Rents), an approach often proposed is that taxes be made on the stated value of the land, subject to the provision that the taxing authority may opt instead to buy the property at that value. It's possible for a landowner to lowball value, but they risk losing the property, at a below-market rate, if they do so.
(The taxing authority might hold the property itself, or turn around and sell it to a third party, at market rates.)
This seems an ingenious rule to address conflicting interests indeed. However, I don't see it applicable to many taxable goods, unfortunately. Some goods, although of high value, require operating costs even and (more importantly) expertise in order for that value to be maintained and realized. For example, a hotel is an active asset that incurs operational costs and therefore its potential acquisition prospect may be shunned by anyone not in the hospitality industry, but still, a taxing authority can make some arrangement for another actor to operate the asset on its behalf. (This I think is in fact how the rule was been thought to work, for things like arable land, where the acquired land could be sold or leased to another peasant.) This is not as easy when the need for expertise comes into play, like it would with a research lab, for example, because the research lab may be one of its kind.
Keep in mind that we're talking, in general here about typical commercial retail: storefronts, restaurant space, small markets, possibly office or light industrial space. Not highly-specialised large-scale hospitality, scientific labs, heavy industry, etc. Yes, those exist, yes, there are vacancies, but *the typical case is going to be pretty quotidian. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the sufficient.
For what it's worth, one of the specialised use-cases probably more likely to be encountered is large-volume food retail, a/k/a supermarkets or grocers. These have distinctive footprints, refrigeration, stocking capabilities, and the like. A few years ago the failure of a large regional grocery brand in the US resulted in numerous commercial vacancies of precisely this nature. There was some controversy when the successor to the chain held on to many of those parcels for years. There were still numerous vacancies at three years after final closing, several locations were demolished entirely, and the last property wasn't repurposed until six years after the original chain had failed. This despite pressure and desire to provide grocery services in the area. As the successor company was also a grocery chain (with operations in the area), stalling transfer of the properties was effectively a way of hamstringing their competition. The space wasn't easily converted to other uses (this happens, Sports Basement at the former Presidio PX in San Francisco is an example, a former A&P supermarket in NYC converted to a community center another), and food retailers hoping to expand had few other options. Notably, despite exploding vacancies in non-food retail, former strip-malls and shopping centres can't easily convert other retail space to groceries.
"how is that a moral hazard if the consequence is that we avoid shops staying empty"
The shops staying empty is one problem. The call for bailing out or helping in any way the creditors that took loans in bad faith by relying on that kind of help (to prop them up along the way) is another problem. I very much want to address the first problem, but not by enacting perverse incentive inducing rules. A better solution (in my view), which I think was mentioned in other comments, was to disallow tax reductions for unused spaces, and maybe even rise them above the tax level for what that space is when rented. In this case the landlord may be incentivized to find ways to make their spaces (at least) look busy (if not be busy with something of real value), which may be what the cities and community think of as an improvement.
"and isn't investing into a property that they then fail to rent out in a profitable manner also already a failure to act within their own limits?"
Yes, it is "already a failure", and it was the reason behind my initial objection. The bad decisions should meet their bad consequences. A "remedy" "to find ways to change the conditions of the loan so that building owners can continue to pay off their loan" sounds to me like a measure to shield decision makers from facing their failures. It is also, in the context of imminent failure, a call for someone else to hold the bag, which is in itself unfair.
thank you, i understand that, but we also need to consider the benefit/downside for the community. i believe it is a mistake to try to punish bad actors when the consequence is that everybody else suffers too. it depends on how many bad actors there are in practice. it's better to allow a small number of bad actors than to implement rules that hinder the majority of good actors. so what is the right approach may depend on the situation locally.
If the banks would prefer to adjust their loans instead of defaulting on them I think they would just naturally do that? They may not want to take a longer loan though.
the question is, why don't they prefer that? what is influencing that decision. for the building owners, if they don't want a longer loan then that's their choice. but we want the building filled, so if forcing them to lower the rents will cause them to go bankrupt because they refuse to accept a longer loan with lower monthly payments, then that's also their choice. and if the banks don't want to offer such a loan, the question is also "why?". if there are legitimate reasons then we need to fix those. if there aren't then it's probably just greed.
If income stream is the metric, then I don't see why 'real' income stream can't be used to evaluate the value of the building instead of the last transaction. If the building sits at half occupancy, then the income stream is 500k, not a theoretical 1M.
TLDR: lowering the rent would create a direct problem for banks to convince investors the building is worth more. And since they've already given the money of the investor away (usually to construct the building in the first place), effectively the bank would have to pay back the difference if they did this.
So it's a choice between honesty and profit towards investors ...
Oh and obviously the "solution" is waiting for inflation to change the price of the rent effectively. So the real fix is for government to take the initiative and start paying people (by now, a lot) more.
There is also the practice of "deferred interest paid in kind", where vacancy is considered temporary, and the bank agrees that the interest for the term of vacancy will be paid at loan maturity. Not sure how/if it applies to multi-tenant buildings, but plenty of them aren't multi-tenant.
there is a problem to be solved. empty shops make shopping areas unattractive. walking through a half empty mall or shopping street is depressive.
i see this all the time in china and in developing countries in general. they build huge malls, and then they can't fill them because there are not enough businesses who can pay the rent being asked. at least there is growth and the place will fill up eventually. but until that happens the place is less attractive.
seeing the same in europe in malls or shopping streets is even worse because it feels like the economy is declining. you have to apply the broken window theory here. the more shops stay empty the less people will go there to visit the remaining shops. their revenue goes down, they can't afford the rent anymore and another shop is empty. if this becomes a trend then you risk that the shops will never come back.
it is therefore in the interest of landlords and the city to keep the streets alive and fill them with businesses that attract people.
ignoring this problem is just a sign of greed. instead of building a vibrant space they just want to extract as much money as possible.
instead of being forced to foreclose the banks should be forced to extend the loan and eat the loss. foreclosing will cause them a loss too. so the banks are not better off either way.
the article says the building is an income stream.
no, it isn't.
the building is part of a community. the needs of the community top your need to make a profit. yes, this means the community should probably contribute to make your work financially viable, and one way they can do that is by making policy that gives you more reasonable conditions to pay off your loan so that a foreclosure is not necessary.
no, i can't. the rent is to high. which means the rent is not market-rate. the free market was supposed to correct that, but it doesn't, so maybe this is not a free market after all.
if my business doesn't make enough profit then i literally can't. that's not an opinion or a choice. that's a fact of life. and if noone is willing to pay that much rent whether they could afford it or not, then the rent is not market-rate. that's not an opinion. that's how market-rate is defined. it is what the market is willing to pay.
you are missing the point, i don't care if i can buy this or not. i care that the street is attractive to people. if i do have a shop in the street (because i can actually afford it) then i care even more because if the street is not attractive then that is hurting my business.
the problem is not that i can't afford it. the problem is that NOBODY can afford it. free market rules then suggest that the value of that thing goes down and thus the price should go down too if the building owner has any interest in selling that thing.
and here is where the free market idea causes a conflict, because if they don't have an interest to sell then their interest and the city's interests are misaligned and the city should force the building-owner out.
or, you could also argue that the city itself is a market participant, because the city owns the land the shops are built on, and it leases or sells that land with specific expectations, namely that shops are built and rented out. if the renting out does not happen then the city's contract with the builder is violated and the city should have a right to take action.
Yes I understand your point - you are just a commentator with no actual interest in the matter hand. Not an owner, not a tenant, just some random stranger strolling on the street thinking other people should do something because you think it's the greater good.
Now you're proposing a different ownership model completely or that a government/city should be able to force a legal owner out of their legally owned property?
Honestly I think you need to back up and really consider what you're proposing.
i am considering what i am proposing. but i can't do that alone. throwing my ideas out there and having them critiqued with counterarguments is the point. if you just say i have no clue and my ideas are bad and i should reconsider then i am not going to learn anything. i can only reconsider if i get new input about what's wrong with my idea.
basically you act like the error in my idea should be obvious, and i should be able to figure that out by myself. well, no, because if i could, i already would have. i don't write stuff without thinking about it. it may look like that to you, but only because you seem to know something that i don't. please share.
and what do you mean by no actual interest? have i not explained my interest? do you think the interests of the people living in the city are irrelevant? only owners and tenants count? well, most certainly not. but if you do not accept that the city and its inhabitants should have an interest in this matter then our problem is that we have a fundamental disagreement in our worldview.
Well, sort of. One scenario is to say "it is illegal to let your property be vacant (for more than X months etc. etc.)". Then suddenly all these owners are violating laws. Another is to say "it is illegal to hold more than $100 million of wealth". Then a bunch of rich people are in violation. Laws are what we make them. The point here is that the current laws are inadequate to produce the society people want to live in. You may be right that no laws are being violated currently in many cases, but that doesn't mean things are fine; it just means we need better laws.
No one is getting that law across the line in any sane country, I’m not even sure why the conversation has veered this far off-topic. Suddenly because some people here do not like commercial vacancies all of a sudden laws are changing so properties are never vacant.
Can’t wait for people here to begin arguing Elon should just sell/give up his equity because Starship hasn’t launched successfully yet.
Not everything needs to make sense to a bunch of IT peeps so, politely, either genuinely learn about commercial property or take a hike.
well i am not from a sane country i guess. keeping homes vacant is already illegal in germany in most places, and laws against vacant commercial properties are being discussed.
this is not just about how commercial property works, but this is about how urban planning works.
you keep insisting that i am a non-interested party. i am speaking for the city and the community. please explain to me how they are non-interested parties.
the needs of the community outweigh the needs of land and building owners. as an owner you are to serve the community. if you don't want to do that then you have no business being part of that community. we'll try to work with you to find an amicable solution, but if you refuse and leave your building abandoned then we can force you to sell. laws to that end already exist. they are used sparingly, but they are there if we really need them.
real estate must be the worst thing to use as an argument for "it's a free market" - because its one of the types of things which every stock is it's own, truly unique monopoly. I can't "freely" produce the same commercial property, unless I already own that property.
in order to join that market you have to buy at the inflated prices on the market, since current owners refuse to sell for a loss, there's nothing you can do as an individual to make this cheaper unless you already own the land.
Location still matters, as it does for residential, proximity to employees, or customers is important.
Zoning restricts what land can do what.
There's many reasons why this isn't a "free market"
The people advocating for change in this situation likely advocated for all the impediments you’re providing as to reasons why it’s not supposedly a free market.
Someone bought an asset they could afford to hold in bad times. End of story.
How, specifically? If they refuse to acknowledge the building is worth less than they expected, they aren't going to sell it to you at a price where you can make money either.
You’re stating the outcome - the property is worth less - without understanding how people buy/sell said property. And asking why others don’t agree?
The article outlines the methods used for the most part to the best of my knowledge, as someone who owns and deals in this space.
I think you need to lay out a better argument for why your thesis is the case when what happens in the real world mirrors what the article discusses. Not to mention people forget property can be owned without a bank/loan, nor that vacancies are expected/factored in.
It all comes back to fractional reserve banking. It is the root of all evil in our financial system. If Rothbard could only see the current state of affairs...
How do you imagine people would get car loans and mortgages without fractional reserve banking? Where do banks get the money to loan out to people if they're not using the deposits from other members of the bank?
You do not even need fractional banking for this. Same thing could happen without it. Someone lends money and is unable to pay it back. Both sides pretend that things will eventually go well. As at least on paper they have not lost anything until prices are realised.
Without fractional banking the bank needs to be way more cautious when appraising an asset and be more conservative with the future gains estimation. Decreasing speculation and inflation of value.
Article is from 2025, and "extend and pretend" is coming unglued.[1] Extend and pretend was big around 2024.[2]
The other side of this is that landlords hate to reduce rent to rent vacant spaces because their paying tenants will demand rent reductions or move. That can crash the rental market. A building half rented at rent X is more profitable than a building fully rented at rent 0.5 X.
[1] https://propmodo.com/the-end-of-extend-and-pretend/
[2] https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr1130
This just says that they have too much power and society would be better off having a vacancy tax that aimed to reduce abuse by landlords while at the same time ensuring the city doesn't look like post crisis Detroit, which makes it worse for everyone.
Yup. Unfortunately landlords have plenty of time to lobby against things like this while the rest of us are busy contributing to society.
Most of the US does, its called property tax. Or in some cases, land value taxes.
That doesn’t work very well in practice because a half vacant commercial property has lower property value than a full one.
There are buildings that seem to purposefully keep commercial space vacant to devalue the building:
https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2021/09/10/trump-gets-anothe...
Property tax isn’t based on vacancy rate, it’s based on property value.
The article writes a bit about property value being based on rents.
So a completely rented building pays the same property tax as an empty building with no renters.
I used to think the same thing, until recently.
Where I live (NC, USA) there was a big issue where commercial property owners have been able to reduce their property tax assessments, not on the basis of 'comparable sales' (like everyone else), but on the basis of the income derived from the property.
I can't say how widespread this practice actually is, but it's not unheard of. Apparently property tax rules are going to vary widely by jurisdiction, which country / which state or province / etc.
There’s one thing you can guarantee in America. If it puts the interests of high income people vs everyday income people, the policies favoring the rich will almost always win out.
And as long as money = speech, this will never change.
It would be absolute stupidity for a property owner to keep a property vacant solely to reduce the property tax assessment. Certainly there are some stupid rich people... but I doubt that the majority are that stupid. There must be some other explanation.
Not the same because it does not depend on utilisation. Pretty much everywhere you see property taxes, but vacancy taxes are a lot more recent and I guess rare so far.
Arguably vacancy taxes are just Georgism with extra steps
If you wanted to switch to Georgism it seems that you'd need to add that and slowly shift taxes into just being the vacancy taxes.
Switching to Georgism overnight seems way too hard to execute.
You really thought you ate with this huh
The city doesn't want commercial real estate values to collapse either, since buildings are taxed based on their value. If extend and pretend is ending, tax revenues are about to take a nosedive.
The city is better off having its citizens participate more in the economy and paying taxes through it than staying home or not starting business because rent is too high.
Not necessarily. That's what's best for the city as in a geographical area where people live. What's best for the city as in an organisation with bureaucrats and finances is probably whatever increases revenues.
> The other side of this is that landlords hate to reduce rent to rent vacant spaces because their paying tenants will demand rent reductions or move.
That too is a "it depends". For a failing mall, getting anyone into the empty spaces starts to become important to the other tenants because anything that draws people into the mall is a potential customer. Customers will even no shop you just because they know there is nothing else in the mall. Thus some malls near me have museums and the like inside - anything to get traffic.
> A building half rented at rent X is more profitable than a building fully rented at rent 0.5 X.
That's assuming rents would decrease by half, and also that it's still half occupied. A building half rented at X isn't more profitable than a building fully rented at 0.7 X. A building 25% rented at X isn't more profitable than a building fully rented at 0.5 X.
If the space is commercial, it's more valuable for the tenants. More traffic, more random sales opportunities. If half-occupied, it looks like a ghetto, and they only get deliberate traffic.
> That can crash the rental market.
At this point I think that's exactly what we need in a lot of places.
I was told capitalism made for efficient use of resources.(inb4 oh you sweet summer child)
If the land isnt being used efficiently the owning entity should fail and a new productive use made.
Whether thats tearing it down for the public to get better use of the land; rerouting roads, community swimming pool, park etc. Replacing with a more economic building; factory, stadium, appartments (zoning not withstanding). Or a more productive entity getting use of it.
Bagholders being entrenched and protected are becoming a weight around the neck
It’s more efficient than other market allocation methods. But it’s not perfectly efficient.
> The other side of this is that landlords hate to reduce rent to rent vacant spaces because their paying tenants will demand rent reductions or move.
Since when have tenants known each other's rents?
The current tenants will see the listing for the vacant unit.
This is how I got a rent reduction in my flat during the pandemic.
Fair point.
Is this one of those secrets, like you aren't supposed to ask your coworkers how much they are getting paid?
> That can crash the rental market
...as if it was a bad thing.
It's bad for one person only, the landlord, which happens to control the rent price
It’s also a bad thing for future investment as building new units becomes riskier.
This explanation seems very implausible to me. By lowering the rent by X%, and therefore reducing annual revenue by X%, you admit the building is worth X% less. But by leaving the building X% vacant, also reducing the annual income stream by X%, you and the bank can somehow pretend the building is worth what it would be if full? I doubt owners and banks actually believe this. Is there some policy that forces this?
The policy is spelled out in the article? Banks have strict regulations that mean they have to have a certain amount of capital backing loans, and by revaluing a building you lower the capital that backs the loan, thus raising its risk, and thus leading you to break the regulation around capital requirements.
It's not a question of what the banks believe, but rather what they believe officially. As long as they keep pretending the loss doesn't need to get accounted for.
> I doubt owners and banks actually believe this.
I worked for a commercial property company before, and yes this is exactly how it works, and yes it's just as stupid as it sounds.
Margin Call nailed it perfectly:
"It's just money. It's made up. Pieces of papers with pictures on it so we don't have to kill each other just to get something to eat".
The argument the article makes is that the bank doesn't want to admit the property is worth less than the mortgage because then they would "have to" foreclose.
The question is, why would they actually do that? The premise is that the landlord has to take out a new mortgage every few years and then the bank won't give them a new one if they're underwater. But that's only true if it's a different bank.
Let's take the same example. Building was expected to be worth $20M, landlord pays $4M down and takes a $16M interest-only mortgage. The only thing the bank ever expected from this was to collect interest on the $16M until it's paid back, which could be never and that's fine as long as they get to keep collecting interest.
Then we find out the building is maybe really only worth $14M. But the landlord is still making the interest payments on the $16M, and over time it will likely become worth more than $16M again due to inflation if nothing else, so why does the bank need to foreclose? The risk that they could "lose $2M" is by that point a sunk cost. It's the thing that happens if they do foreclose (or fail to renew the loan). They'd be calling in the note against an LLC that owns nothing but a building which is now estimated to be worth less than the loan principal. So the obvious thing would be to keep renewing it as long as the landlord continues to make the interest payments.
This feels like some kind of regulatory inefficiency or accounting scam where the bank is listing the mortgage lien as an asset and would have to take a write off if they valued it accurately and therefore transfer their perverse incentive to the landlord to prevent that from happening.
Notice however that doing that also hurts the bank. The landlord is collecting $500k/year at half occupancy, then paying the bank $640k and losing $140k/year to try to avoid the total loss of their $4M initial investment. Maybe they can do that for a year or three but the longer it continues the higher the probability that they run out of money. Whereas if they were collecting the $700k/year from renting out the entire building at lower rents then they could keep paying the bank its $640k/year forever, regardless of whether they're technically underwater. And if the landlord runs out of money then the bank has to take the $2M write off because they get a $14M building instead of collecting interest on a $16M loan. So the bank is really shooting itself in the foot.
Not if the economy actually does recover, or at least "looks" like it recovered on paper. Inflation helps with that.
The average inflation over the last 10 years has been just north of 3%. If you have tenants today that are paying $500k/year, in 10 years they should be paying almost $700k/year with 50% occupancy. If you can string the bank along for another loan then your valuation is $28M instead of $20M. As the owner you can effectively take money out in this scenario.
If the bank won't refinance at that rate, then you could lower your rents by a bit in the last year. If you lowered your rates back down to $500k/year then you invite a bunch of new tenants, and now you can show high occupancy again.
But how does it help the bank to require that? Suppose the landlord lowered rents to raise occupancy so they could get $700k now instead of after several years of inflation. If all goes according to plan then the bank gets its interest payments either way, and then the landlord would be making $900k with full occupancy instead of $700k with half occupancy.
But if the value doesn't recover then the landlord is still only getting $500k while paying $640k at the point when they run out of money to pay their $140k annual loss, and then they default. Which they wouldn't do, even if the value never recovers, if they were allowed to make $700k by lowering rents.
The problem is the bank didn’t leave a buffer to meet their requirements, so arbitrage between reality and official reality comes to the rescue.
If a bank only loaned 60% of a buildings value, it could be devalued, the operator would eat the shortfall, but the bank could reappraise, with the loan continuing as before.
[So a regulation setting a banks maximum loan percentage, at a percentage less than they are required to maintain, is an obvious regulatory fix.]
However, another way to look at this from a banks point of view is while they may loan 80%, they might have been happy to loan 100% but for regulations. So perversely, they may not be as concerned about this happening as it appears.
For them, the 80% max loan is already providing a buffer, in terms of the risk they would be happy to take. So if they can avoid acknowledging they have loans that have risen in percentage terms, it is in their business interest to encourage, facilitate, giving operators breathing room.
And in the meantime, inflation, property value growth, and future demand increases provide three statistically “expected” ways for the situation to self-correct over time.
For financial investment products, all value is “expected” value.
And the operator may not be losing money, so much as paying for the buildings accrued value growth. Which would be a wash, but avoids the practical problems of defaults. Not the best, but not losing (as much) money as it appears.
And for the bank, if the loan payments are made there is no problem.
So there are two hidden buffers: banks willingness to loan more than regulators want them to, and natural property value increases, lowering rent prices (i.e. inflation) over time.
> The problem is the bank didn’t leave a buffer to meet their requirements
They did though. It was a $20M building and they only loaned out $16M, providing a $4M buffer. It isn't possible to require an amount that the value of the building could never fall below under any circumstances because that would require the loan amount to be zero. It's always possible for the value of the property to crash, e.g. it becomes contaminated with toxic waste and the remediation costs more than the property value, or the area's major employer shuts down and the area becomes a ghost town.
Meanwhile increasing the size of the buffer has costs that can exceed the value of a larger buffer, i.e. fewer people can afford a mortgage, which is both economically bad and not in the interests of the bank who wants to make more loans rather than fewer.
> However, another way to look at this from a banks point of view is while they may loan 80%, they might have been happy to loan 100% but for regulations.
The reason banks require a down payment instead of loaning out 100% of the value of the property is definitely because the banks want the buffer to not be zero.
> And for the bank, if the loan payments are made there is no problem.
But that's the issue. If they prevent the landlord from lowering rents to increase occupancy then they may not be able to make the payments anymore, and then the bank is screwed.
> They did though. It was a $20M building and they only loaned out $16M, providing a $4M buffer
The problem is the bank is regulated to only maintain loans at 80% of property value or lower.
If they give a loan at the maximum allowable level, they don't have a (legal) buffer.
Thus the strong incentive to perform creative bookkeeping, to avoid having to repossess property they don't want. Instead of simply recognizing the falling property value in their accounting, which without a forced call, is the property owners loss, not theirs.
The whole goal is not to write off the value of the property which you have to do if you rent it for less money than initially planned. That's not that difficult to understand is it?
I mean, it's highly unintuitive, which I would say makes it difficult to understand. The main weirdness is that lowering the rent would force a revaluation whereas letting the building sit vacant for an extended period of time apparently would not. If this is truly driven by regulatory capital requirements, then it seems like a gap in the regulations.
Also foreclosure generally isn't the only option: the borrower could, for example, agree to repay part of the loan early, or give extra collateral, both of which would increase the LTV (and this would be better for the bank).
I'm not saying the explanation is wrong, but I don't blame people for finding it difficult to understand. Other factors contributing to this are probably borrower relationships/negotiating strength and the high costs associated with foreclosing.
Banks care that you pay their loan first and foremost, how you do that as the borrower is up to you.
They care about the regulatory requirements in so far as you either meet it, or you don’t at the time of writing a loan. And maybe you get a yearly review.
Also people are looking at this in a very isolated view. Just because a building is vacant doesn’t mean the owner has no other option than just lower the rent. Typically owners of commercial property own multiple properties and various other types of assets. Vacancy rates are also built into calculations.
That's the missing link on these - the owner is making payments either way - the bank is getting their money.
They don't want to disrupt the flow or trigger contract clauses, so they cover the missing cashflow from elsewhere.
They are extending loans though. In a normal market, requesting an extension when the bank knows you're underwater should set off some risk alarm bells and trigger a denial. The "normal person" intuition about how loans work is correct here: if I try to refi my house when it's underwater and I've lost my income, the bank denies the refi. That incentivizes me to do what it takes to make the bank whole, or, make the appropriate decision to leave my house and let someone else who can afford it take over payments.
When everyone, the regulator, the operator, and the bank, are whistling a tune, when the whole sector is fucked, everyone has a big problem. How big? About as big as hundreds of buildings in the downtown of every major city sitting half-empty!
That's a pretty big problem. Maybe not as large as 08 but definitely structural. We're all paying indirectly for this office space to sit empty, instead of being able to use it.
I recommend getting out there and getting involved - it's surprisingly easy to end up talking to the actual owners of these buildings, and they're more often than not just a guy and not some weird conglomerate REIT and they'll make a deal but they'll also tell you what and why - listen!
Capital is weird.
You don’t have knowledge into the borrowers capacity to pay based on a single vacancy.
I have the capacity to pay someone to dig a hole and fill it in. Would that be a wise use of my resources?
We're talking about the whole sector here, not one borrower. Huge swathes of commercial real estate are sitting empty, that's a big ongoing problem for everyone whether the loans are being serviced or not.
Dig and fill away dear fellow, that's what this site does best.
The whole sector doesn't have a vacancy problem. And it's not a problem for the banks nor the owners if they're servicing their loans. Sure they're not making money but that's not your or anyone else's problem either.
Have you heard the story of Boeing and the "cost-plus" contracts? Digging a hole and filling it in can be quite profitable!
> lowering the rent would force a revaluation
Commercial leases are often for say 5+5 years, so once you lock it in, you know for sure what the property revenue is going to be for the next so many years. Your uncertainty equation has collapsed.
I think the main insight here is that commercial real estate is an entirely different animal than the residences that you may be used to.
You can apply this same reasoning to the "back to the office" pushes done on behalf of the institutional investors who have exposure to large commercial properties in inner cities. That too is a financial house of cards built on assumptions and vibes.
Nobody said commercial real estate was risk free free money in some abstract financial product, other than the doofus who wrote this long "note." The hard fact is these are real buildings in real places that aren't really fungible at all. So it seems kind of ridiculous that CRE investors should be insulated from every possible externality. Obviously the right thing to do is to tax vacant properties, and then we shall see how many stay vacant and how many foreclosures there are (hint: owners suddenly find capital and are able to pay the tax or rent things out and nothing ever gets foreclosed in every one of these scenarios where it actually happens).
What you’re proposing is a brand new tax just because you don’t like people who play by the rules as written.
Well done. Way to encourage people to not do things.
The specific proposal is not great but changing the rules is in fact the correct solution of the current rules lead to systematically bad outcomes.
How is it systematically bad? Is there a banking crisis?
Have you heard of this thing called people being happy. . .
What’s that got to do with a bunch of empty buildings that people in this thread do not own?
i think you are on the first step of the journey to seeing that neither math nor maximizing $ is the solution to all problems. it's not even the solution to most problems.
What is being missed is that most commercial leases are much longer term than residential leases. Businesses will want to renovate the space and sign a 10 or 20 year lease. So if you lower the rent by 30% you will really be reducing the income of the building over the long term and face those consequences when refinancing. Landlords will frequently try to rent out unused space to temporary tenants like popups or non profits that they can move in without renovation and kick our on shorter notice to generate some cash-flow and keep the storefront occupied.
> Landlords will frequently try to rent out unused space to temporary tenants like popups
and Spirit Halloween.
Think of it that way - until you haven't climbed on the scale, you haven't gained weight, even if your pants are bursting at the seams.
At some point, you don't need to stand on the scales for it to be obvious you are a fat bastard. Ditto, it's obvious to all that commercial property has lost a huge amount of value.
I suggest that like the dotcom/2008/AI bubbles, people will just keep dancing and making money until reality catches up and the music stops.
Here the bank cares less about annual income than future income.
Keeping it vacant only impact current income, lowering rent impacts future forecasts.
> Keeping it vacant only impact current income, lowering rent impacts future forecasts.
Does it though? Suppose you can't find a tenant right now because the market is soft but is predicted to improve in a few years. If you leave the unit vacant, you lose money right now. If you rent it out with e.g. a 3-year lease, you make more for the next 3 years than you would with a vacancy, and if the market price has increased by then you can increase the rent on the unit and either get it from the current occupant or the one you get to replace them in the high demand market when the higher rent causes the low-paying tenant to not renew the lease.
So taking a tenant now only improves prospects (you fill a current vacancy) with no negative impact on future returns. The only thing it does is imply that current rents are lower than before and future rents might be too, but a vacancy implies that even more strongly.
it's because the expected future income is based on what current tenants are paying, extrapolated to the number of units in the building, ignoring vacancies. I get what you are saying, it should be based on total rental income from the building - full stop - but that isn't how it is done, and this is the result.
Simply stated, if you rent a new unit for 25% lower, then the value of the building just dropped 25%. If you don't rent to a new tenant, your value must be the same, that's what the existing tenants are paying (not that I agree with this, it's just how it works right now).
It's similar to how people holding low liquidity assets will claim they are "worth" whatever the last person who paid for this assert, even if the real value of it is dropped, the "book value" is still sky high.
Why do banks calculate it that way? Do they all do it that way, is it legally compelled? It seems obviously incorrect.
> but that isn't how it is done, and this is the result.
And the result is dumb, which is the point. The bank should stop doing that if they don't want to cause problems for themselves.
Review again how this works. The landlord put in $4M and the bank $16M on what was supposed to be a $20M building. They can't find enough tenants, which means in real life it's only worth $14M and the incumbent system is for everybody to pretend that isn't the case when it really is.
As a result, the landlord is collecting $500k in net rent instead of the $700k they could get by lowering rents and getting more tenants, while paying the bank $640k/year in interest. The landlord does this because if the value of the building eventually recovers then they don't lose their initial $4M investment, whereas if they hand over the keys to the bank it's definitely gone. And even if that money was gone, they'd still want to keep operating the building if they were at least turning any annual profit instead of making continuous losses.
This is bad for the landlord (they lose $140k/year instead of making $60k/year) and it's even worse for the bank, because now if the landlord runs out of cash or concludes the value of the building isn't going to recover, the bank has to eat a $2M loss by foreclosing instead of continuing to collect $640k in interest every year, which they could have done indefinitely if the landlord was allowed to keep renewing the loan while making more money by lowering rents and increasing occupancy.
Worse, this is happening at scale. If landlords could lower rents without getting foreclosed on then banks would keep getting their interest payments until inflation catches up to the nominal amount of the mortgage. But if the landlords are required to keep taking a loss, they eventually start to give up -- the article implies that they don't want to give up until the annual loss eats the original $4M, but it really happens as soon as they think the value of the building isn't going to recover. But that's only a problem for the bank if they default on the mortgage, which they do if keeping it makes them lose $140k/year but not if it's still earning them $60k/year. And that's especially a problem for the banks if it happens not just at all but all at once.
I'm not defending the status quo, I'm just laying out how it is. I think it's stupid too.
That's the trick, isn't it, though? Rationally it's especially a problem if it happens all at once, but realistically if your bank has an awful quarter then you're at fault whereas if every bank has an awful quarter then no one's at fault, it's a systemic issue, chances are you get to collect a bail out and keep going. It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma, a critical mass of banks needs to defect and each individual bank's incentive is to cooperate.
If you let a family member move in for free that doesn't make the value of the building go to $0. That valuation strategy is too simplistic.
Prices are set at the margins
Humans are not Pareto efficient.
If my wife and I are at the airport, and the gate agent offers me (and only me) an upgrade on the flight, your logic says I should take it since that's strictly better than both of us flying economy.
> If my wife and I are at the airport, and the gate agent offers me (and only me) an upgrade on the flight, your logic says I should take it since that's strictly better than both of us flying economy.
This has happened many times to me - the answer is to take it and give the upgrade to your traveling companion if you are the one who flies a lot.
This happened on the flight to my honeymoon, and my wife took the upgrade.
I assume you mean your ex-wife? ;)
Jk of course
You should take it and then switch seats with your wife. Happy wife, happy life.
> Happy wife, happy life.
Why wouldn't that happy cycle work with the husband ?
In the USA, women initiate divorce proceedings ~70% of the time. see https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220511-why-women-file...
[dead]
haha
From a Christian perspective:
> Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her...In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself
Too many people ignore this part of that "submit yourselves to your husbands" quote.
For those of us who think of themselves as Christian, I think sitting in a less comfortable seat is probably small potatoes to what Christ did on the cross.
Just throwing out some biblical ideas here. I know there are a lot of other perspectives.
Business tenants know perfectly well that when it comes time to renew a commercial lease and local rents have increased, the renewal rent is going to approximate the current market price.
The landlord doesn't want you to to leave but only to the extent that finding a new tenant costs more than the discount against the current market price they'd have to give you to stay.
A three year lease locks in the lower revenue. If the market recovers tomorrow you can have the full price for nearly as long.
But I'm not convinced the risk-reward calculation fully explains it. You can see plenty of places where they know full well it's not going to rent at the price they're asking. I think there are other factors, including not letting your other high-lease tenants think that they're now occupying a low-rent establishment.
Your jewelry store would rather not suddenly be next to a cheapo nail salon. And if you've got a third property to lease, the high-fashion brand looking at it will see the nail salon and move on.
This is the same reason in housing market where landlords let their property sit empty instead of accepting lower rent. There is a perception that lower rents attract problem tenants and it’s not worth the headache even if that means losing money.
> Does it though? Suppose you can't find a tenant right now because the market is soft but is predicted to improve in a few years.
You'd need perfect information to make a contractual decision on that, and it still has lasting effects.
For instance imagine renting your floors to Pornhub for these 3 years on the cheap because the market it low. Assuming you made the right calculation and demand recovers 3 years later, you'll have to first kick out the company (= months spent restoring it), then try to convince the insurance company that eyes at your building that they should pay a hiked price to move into Pornhub's previous floors.
And that's assuming you haven't completely blown it where the market actually recovers within 6 months for reasons nobody anticipated.
How you think about it is different to how the multiple different players think about it.
If you’re levered up to the eyeballs you don’t want your bank reviewing your file.
But that just means the bank is creating deliberately delusional forecasts.
I can build a building that charges a billion dollars a month rent, and sits completely empty. A forecast suggestion I'll be making hundreds of billions with no renters is clearly silly.
You’re paying the loan, go for it son.
I commented about the logic of the bank's forecasting. Your response doesn't make sense in that context.
Your fictional scenario doesn’t make sense either? Why should it warrant a serious reply.
How do you asses the value? You use the x last transactions. No transactions, no data, the last value remains.
"Last value" is pretty meaningless when it's stale though.
Suppose there is a building that was built in 1970, last rented out in 1975 and then bought by a company that has used it as their own offices until now. The last transaction was in 1975, what's the value if they apply for a mortgage today? Surely they have some formula to use for this based on e.g. other buildings in the area.
Moreover, "failure to find a tenant" is also a type of transaction. It's the landlord acting as the high bidder for the space, essentially the involuntary edition of imputed rent, and implies something negative about the financial prospects of the building when it continues for a significant period of time or large percentage of units. Ignoring that it is either incompetence or some kind of perverse incentive.
> "Last value" is pretty meaningless when it's stale though.
For who and in what way though? Every entity involved wants to keep the price high, except the renter/new buyer, so with that in mind, "Last Value" seems optimal for achieving that.
Maybe it's different in the US, but in Spain there is a ton of properties that sit completely empty and unused, even since earlier than 2008, just because the owners don't think the value is enough to sell yet, and they wouldn't earn enough renting it out, so everyone (except renters/new buyers) seems to prefer it just sits empty for decades.
> For who and in what way though?
For anyone who wants an accurate accounting.
Suppose the building is supposed to be worth $20M, has an existing $10M mortgage and is actually only worth $10M. The landlord comes to you and wants to borrow another $5M against the building. Pretty important to the lender at this point that they're not overvaluing it, right? Or the same if they go to a different bank trying to refinance an existing mortgage they're already underwater on when using an accurate accounting.
Commercial borrowers have to pay for a valuation report by a bank approved valuer.
Then why does anybody care if they rent out some of the units for a lower rent?
You keep asking the same question and the answer is the same in all these.
You don’t like it. We get it.
No one is doing anything illegal. If the bank thought a customer couldn’t pay, they’d get foreclosed, end of story.
It's not a matter of whether I like it. It's a question of why the bank, unless required to do so by some kind of absurd perverse regulatory incentive, would do something which is not only harming others but also increasing the default risk for the bank by reducing the income of a borrower who, if they can't make the payments, will cause the bank to have to write off millions of dollars by foreclosing on an underwater building.
Harming others is a stretch.
You’re also assuming every vacancy has this pigeon holed financial setup. A LOT of commercial property is freehold.
I’m honestly at a bit of a loss that people feel they can tell others what to do with their property because it’s vacant. That’s not how society works, and it won’t change to that either.
if the society decides that they don't want properties to stay empty, then that's exactly how it works. and yes, it will change to that if people want it. german cities are already discussing options how to motivate owners to fill their properties through various incentives including legal ones.
Good luck!
No one was really discussing in a EU context though.
... who therefore agree with the assumptions of this broken system.
Broken how? The owner/bank are fulfilling their obligations. You just don’t like the outcome.
When people are fulfilling their obligations and most other people are not happy with the outcome, that usually means the definition of "obligations" is wrong.
Way to change the goal posts to suit.
Not sure what you mean. The goal is a good society. Allowing certain individuals to keep certain things they currently have was never any part of my goal. (I can't speak for others in the thread of course.)
I picture the banks and the landlords would do better in the long term too if the shops were full.
This is not Bluesky leftist "let's take Jeff Bezos' yacht so we can all have 15 minutes of health insurance" but rather "let's have more businesses in this town that can put capital to work, create jobs, create wealth and the kind of consumer choice that Ralph Nader and Ludwig von Mises both agreed on."
You’re free to buy said vacant property/ies and lease them out at rates or your choosing.
There are buildings in my town that haven't been used in 20-30 years. And that's in the 'modern' shopping area. In the old 'downtown' area there are some that have been empty for 40+ years.
There's a building near my office. Never technically finished so empty for 10+ years. I believe the two owners had a disagreement.
One day a crew turns up and starts jack hammering away a gangway. Its technically now two buildings; one of them is still unfinished and empty, the other has now been finished and is up for rent.
In terms of my utility I would prefer things renovated, changed, or rented out to funky things than have ghastly empty buildings
This sounds like the worst case outcome for society; real estate permanently allotted to some entity that chooses not to use it. It is not an envious model; it is a model that should be eliminated.
If a coffee shop is charging $25 for a latte and sells none, we don't say everything's fine because no sales data. The sales are $0 and it's not fine.
There is no escaping the powers of supply and demand.
“You” require a continuous analysis of cash flow to continuously determine value, and proper management. A simple, and common, requirement in commercial lending called the debt service coverage ratio.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dscr.asp
Lower income for the building means lower numerator, which means being unable to meet the agreed upon DSCR, which means default. Whether or not the lender acts on this default is a separate matter, as they are usually loathe to get into the property management business, but renegotiation of terms and eventually foreclosure does happen.
Agreed. From the article:
Actual commercial real estate professionals could give you many more reasons than I can
I am so tired of listening to people with little to no experience with commercial real estate try and explain the vacant storefront thing. Maybe this explanation in the article is correct, but it raises more questions than it answers, and it’s unclear why we should trust this person’s explanation.
do you have a better explanation?
It's on the person who willingly took the public stage to prove that their ideas have merit.
I don't know much about microbiology, but that shouldn't stop me from asking someone who "did their own research" to shut up and let the experts talk.
they already gave their explanation. if you disagree then it is on you to provide a counter argument otherwise anyone could just shoot down any argument by claiming that it has no merit.
at best you could say that you do not find the argument convincing, but even then you should explain why. you are not even claiming that the argument in question is wrong, you are only questioning the credentials of the author. that's appeal to authority, and therefore not a valid argument. https://youtu.be/N5k4yUSPHI8
I don't know much about microbiology, but that shouldn't stop me from asking someone who "did their own research" to shut up and let the experts talk.
yes it should, unless you can provide a convincing argument that the person is wrong, expert or not.
on the internet anyone can claim to be an expert and nobody can prove it.
I’m agreeing with the person I first responded to about why I don’t find this explanation credible. I don’t feel the need to reiterate what they said.
AND I’m also saying I’m tired of non-experts giving their theories on this particular phenomenon, since they never make much sense.
Oh my goodness, thank you. My wife had to move her store in 2020 in the midst of lockdown; you'd think rents would have been low, but no. Since then, many of the places that wouldn't lower the rent then, have sat empty ever since. This is in Austin, TX, a town that has had a healthy economy during that entire time.
Weirder still, many of them were on the market, theoretically for rent, but if you called them up it turned out they weren't actually available, and the landlord wasn't interested in renting them. I couldn't figure out why you would pretend something was for rent at $X, and let it sit empty for years, rather than actually rent it at something <$X. Now it makes sense.
Wait, were they not available at $x, or not available for < $x? Because if it’s the former, then this article doesn’t really explain your experience, right?
Could be this (from the article): "Another scenario I can think of is that the financial model for the building requires spaces to be filled by “credit tenants,” meaning name-brand businesses of a certain caliber and creditworthiness."
Might not be available unless your name ends in 'tarbucks'.
Yep. The owner assigns much higher value to leasing to a large national chain. They often hold out for one, refusing to lease to more risky businesses.
Another thing that I read about on this topic was that once a land lord has gotten into a groove of extend and pretend they lower their costs and cut out the overhead of property management. This means that if they took on one tenant they would have to ramp up property management costs (and potentially refurb/improvement costs) and they are not willing to do that, so you end up with the situation where you can't rent a property even if you want to.
Several instances of both. In at least one case they told us that they wanted to rent to a big-name tenant at a larger space in the same complex, before they started renting any of the smaller places. What seemed odd to me is that they would nonetheless put the property "on the market", i.e. online listing, even though if you called up they would say it's not for rent. I figured it had to be to claim that it was "available for rent" in some technical sense, but I didn't know why.
In others they would just have too high a price, and it is still empty six years later so they are clearly not unaware that they have it priced too high. Simple math showed they would be better off renting at a lower price than going years without anything, but it was quite common so it didn't seem like it could be simple stupidity.
The test, I guess, of this explanation is whether or not the flow of money out of private credit causes the end of "extend and pretend", and the market finally clears.
The key analysis is how does the system manage the risk that a building's equilibrium rent goes down or turns out to be lower than assumed when writing the loan.
The system described in the article is basically that the risk is not explicitly planned for, and just washes out that it is managed by a vacancy and building owners eating the cost of the vacancy.
Any solution needs to provide a new answer for how that risk is managed, preferably one that doesn't result in foreclosures. Some possibility:
* The bank takes on the risk, by loans having a provision for writing down value if rents have to drop. This is tricky, because if the operator decides when rents need to be revised down, they have no incentive to protect the bank's position. If the bank decides, then they have no incentive to ever accept a rent drop, they'd rather force the operator to eat the vacancy. You'd need some trigger like duration of vacancies.
* The operator takes on the risk but with a mechanism for lowering the rent. I can't really figure out a way this would work without requiring the operator to have capital on hand though.
* The risk is insured. If rents need to drop then insurance pays the write-down in property value. I'm not sure any insurance company would be able to take this business though, as it is highly correlated between customers. A downturn would just wipe-out the insurer.
My preferred solution is "whoever has the most money gets the risk".
How come this obvious workaround isn't used much more often:
>> If the system allows you to pretend that the vacancy is temporary, why doesn’t it allow you to lower rents on the pretense that lower rents are also temporary?
> This does happen sometimes: it’s packaged as “incentive offers,” like 50% off the first 12 or 24 months rent, or 6 months without rent, etc, that lower the average rent over the life of the lease without lowering the “list price.” That’s common in residential leases, and I know it happens sometimes in commercial leases, but I don’t know how prevalent it is.
It is worth noting that the reason they are pretending is almost certainly because of regulatory demands - if it were just between the bank and the owner they'd agree to do what is in both of their best interests - rent the space out at market rates. If there is a market-based 3rd party involved they will figure out that the bank is playing games and start acting whether or not the bank officially recognises the losses. Surely only a regulator or other similar heavily law-bound body would tolerate this sort of sillyness.
So as a blind guess, it probably depends on how legal incentive offers are. The axis being optimised here will be what the regulatory bodies can tolerate before they start handing out fines and punishments.
Ah. That makes sense. Maybe the polite fiction would clash too obviously with accounting standards once the (de facto) lowered rent payments roll in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48567769
Could the situation be improved then if financial regulators started treating both versions ("temporary" vacancy / "temporarily" lowered rent) equally? Tolerate both or crack down on both.
Banks maintain the capital/liquidity ratio’s they’re told they have too.
People are actually advocating for looser lending requirements, which I’m perfectly fine with but the result might not be what they expect either.
I agree. I see a lot of comments alluding to the 'regulations' being bad. They are there for a reason. To keep errant bankers from loaning out too much money and creating an even more fragile system.
People have to realize that banking as a business is inherently broken. It is about lending long and borrowing short, which is very risky. Deposits are used to provide funds to lend long, but deposits can be 'called' at any time. The loans cannot.
But banking is also critical for a properly functioning society. It is in the government's (the people's) best interest to have a robust banking system in place. How to reconcile the risk with the benefit? By heavily regulating it.
Say what you want, but a law that lets you pretend that the value of a building is based on what you ask, rather than what you can actually obtain, is a stupid law.
It's not a law, it's a financial contract between a borrower and a lender.
I agree it's stupid, but that's what you get when you let the invisible hand bind human hands
What is a better option? Before your answer, remember it sometimes really is the case that the economy is down and in two years things will recover and everything will rent out again. Your answer needs to smooth that out.
Rolling average including vacant months as $0? And if that isn't smooth enough, add some smoothing factor, count vacant months as 10% of the last paid value, or maybe the first vacant month as 50% with further months decaying. Or some other fancy accounting that makes more sense than the current method.
Nothing will happen until wealthy people are negatively affected.
"remember it sometimes really is the case that the economy is down and in two years things will recover and everything will rent out again"
Where do we draw the line between reality and fantasy then? If the terms of a deal are not reflecting the reality of the moment (i.e. the office rent market demand quotes) but some figure people come up with on their own, then let's call it what it is -- gambling (in which case it should be treated as such).
Smooth it out for who? If the answer is "the person who owns a $20 million building" then my answer is "I don't care".
Not caring is why we are in this place where rent doesn't go down. Now, maybe it is really is not your problem, but be aware that it is a problem for someone and in turn, you can raise your costs if you are shopping at those businesses. If financials doesn't pencil out, then either the business closes or they raise prices.
> Not caring is why we are in this place where rent doesn't go down.
Not sure what you mean. What I mean is that I am fine with policies that effectively force the building owner to lower the rent (if their net worth is high enough) even if it means they take a loss, because I am fine with forcing people with lots of money to take losses. So the rent will go down.
I actually think there's a business to be had here.
As described, the landlord can't offer a traditional lease for the actual value of the space.
However, the landlord could offer essentially day rentals without creating a lease. There are systems for this already, such as Peerspace and their ilk, which I've used for small events. I believe these don't trigger the foreclosure clauses.
I think that a property management company managing deeply underwater buildings could play in this, reducing their cost structure by offering day rates. They've often already got a solid NFC entry system. Most of what you need is automated pricing, onboarding and offboarding, and figuring out how you avoid needing physical cleaning/setup/teardown overhead.
I can't comment on that specific structure, but pop-up shops are one method that in the UK councils will often help vacant buildings with for exactly this reason, with the upside that they may convert into permanent tenants.
Yup....
And the downside is loads of reasonably successful decent small shops in the UK now have to close after 12-24 months when the rents get jacked-up from sensible to astronomical levels. None of them become permeant tenants unless they are a front for money laundering (hence the explosion of nail bars and barbers on the UK high street) or illegal goods (dodgy vape shops).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqj1rkqqrgro
Your local press (if yours still exists) will also be full of such stories.
Anything over 30 days is likely not to be a pop-up shop. There's no way to give a tenant 12+ months without triggering the foreclosure clauses, AFAIK.
The UK is different old boy.
Of course it is! But I don't think it's different in this way. Did you have a specific data point about a 12-24 month rental getting kicked out in order to prevent foreclosure?
Isn't that through council subsidy rather than avoiding a foreclosure-trigger tenant agreement?
I own a commercial property, I wouldn’t want to have day to day rentals.
I don’t enjoy dealing with property management or the fees they charge.
Tell me more - is your commercial property vacant? I'm a landlord myself, and the calculus gets very different when you have a long term vacancy.
Tenanted.
I know regardless of the vacancy I would not consider day rates, I’d eat the loss and deal with the cashflow via other means. Consider what sort of fit out would be necessary for what’s lets be honest is being suggested - hot desking - compared to a standard office: lots of IT systems necessary, lots of additional security, lots more cleaning, and likely lots more repairs for wear & tear which probably isn’t recoverable easily.
I'm not suggesting hotdesking at all; you may have seen someone else's comments suggesting they thought that! My best example (provided in my original comment) was Peerspace, but there are many others like that. Zero infrastructural investment past giving someone a key (or setting up an HID reader and such).
What sort of property do you own and do you utilise this service?
I can’t fathom just putting some dinky reader on the front door and letting absolutely anyone in.
The current tenants of mine started a lithium battery fire, almost burnt my property down.
I own both commercial and residential property. I have used the company I mentioned, but I'm not trying to advertise for them, I just know other examples exist.
I didn't install a reader, I provided a physical key copy. Readers make it slicker.
I haven't had any problems, most of my rentals have been for small events. They brought their own supplies, minus a few tables I provided.
Generally people renting space have no incentive to create a problem. They pay, I get paid, they want to take some pictures or get some people together.
So, wework? :o)
Ha, cute, but no, very different. Wework is a tenant, and does significant buildouts. This would be "you can use the space for a few days or weeks".
I've seen companies provide some moveable furniture in a space like this - some desks, some extension cords - but it has to be up to the temporary user to configure and put things away when they're done.
Gosh... someone finally explained the WeWork business model that is more reasonable than "walk barefoot and expect money to rain from the sky".
Came here to say the same thing... A "building-sized financial product that incentivises extend and pretend" is fertile ground for an organised player like wework to "lease and sublet, except on a subscription basis".
viz. wework could apply the "single-use low-priced shampoo sachet" model [0] to SaaS-style rent-seeking of long-lived infrastructure. Infra. that is guaranteed to be always under-utilised... even in boom markets, because nothing functions at 100% capacity.
Adobe, as another example of (software) infrastructure --- i.e. traditionally, lifetime licence and ownership desktop software --- figured out their own "shampoo sachet" pricing. viz. how to make and ship desktop software product but kill-switch them with metered SaaS subscriptions.
The monthly price is just high enough to make gobs of cash for Adobe, while causing the typically-feast-and-famine freelancer to take the capitalist shellacking because it's just convenient enough. They can align software spends with active projects, and avoid the anxiety of cracked software doing nefarious things to their computers and data.
But over a long enough time, they pay Adobe a (presumably) huge premium over up-front priced software. And they stay locked into a planned obsolescence cycle controlled by Adobe... "The new version of your beloved editing software will only work with the latest Windoze which means hardware upgrade and oh, you have to do it because well we are soon kill-switching the current version you are dependent on."
Wework like operators can do exactly similar shenanigans with access to commercial infrastructure. Crowd out competition by aggressive long-term leasing on their buy-side, and on their sell-side build daily-subscription-dependency (buying ease, google-ish facilities which feeds into cult-and-status-signalling games), and convert a percentage of that into routine-subscription-dependency. Meanwhile also run rent-seeking games inside the main rent-seeking game... now you have a captive wallets who will buy the add-ons and extras because it's easier than walking two blocks for some cheaper and better alternative (e.g. food, coffee, lovely meeting space etc.).
edit: add reference for "daily sachet pricing".
[0] Buying less, more often: An evaluation of sachet marketing strategy in an emerging market
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233676293_Buying_le...
well, isn't the rent estimated as the daily rate * 30 then?
By whom, for what purpose?
Has anyone here considered the cost of capital reserves required by the bank for holding this loan? Commercial loans used to be a 100% capital holding requirement, while HVCRE (High Volatility Commercial Real Estate) Loans carry 150% capital holding. So if a bank loans a building owner 100% of a 20 million dollar facility and it meets HVCRE requirements, the bank has to keep 30 million of capital in reserve for the chance of default. Even if the loan receives enough buyer downpayment or for some other reason becomes normal Commercial loan the bank has to hold 20 million in reserve capital for the loan. So you have to net the incentive of the cost of the capital held in reserve against the interest payment on the bank's balance sheet as an economic forcing against continuing to float the loan forever...
aren't we in a zero reserves era?
Here is the problem:
> Half empty, the building is only generating $500k per year in net income instead of $1M.
> Let’s imagine the owner lowers the rent by 30% to fill the building.
> Now, reality has proven the operator can only make $700k per year.
No. When the building sat half empty, reality had already proven that it could not generate what they thought it could.
This is the insane fallacy driving this whole thing, and no amount of explanations about commercial mortgages will prove anything other than that a larger number of people than we thought are participating in the same delusion. If you cannot rent the space for what you thought it could rent for, your building is already worth less than you thought, and it is sheer folly to think that you can alter that fact by pretending you are waiting for higher rent later.
> So, cities could do something like put a vacant storefront tax and… make them lose even more money? If that “worked,” the mechanism would be to force a lot of commercial property to default, which could put a lot of new space on the market at lower prices, which should lower the commercial rent. But it would also hurt the banks a lot, which has a history of leading to bad consequences and subsequent bailouts.
There is another problem. What we need is to dig deeper into that theory and push harder and harder for solutions where all the financial loss gets pushed onto the people at the top who have a lot of money. If the banks are making money off this kind of nonsense then they should fail.
> I’ll give this some more thought, but if any actual commercial real estate professionals have ideas I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
No! Commercial real estate professionals are mostly just more people buying into these same fallacies! What we need is more people outside that self-deluding system saying "this is nuts, I'm taking $100 million from you" and resetting the entire system.
> Let’s imagine the owner lowers the rent by 30% to fill the building.
Thought I'd comment with some concrete numbers. New buildings near me (West LA) are at $4100/month for a studio, where average rent in the area is $2300 for a studio, $2650 for a 1-bedroom. To fit in with "average" rent they'd need to lower 44% however 30% might be about right. Otherwise at 4% inflation wait 9 years? 1.04^9 = 1.42 ~ 100/(100 - 30).
> a larger number of people than we thought are participating in the same delusion
Congratulations, you have just described high finance.
The "problem" is that we let people claim the "rent" is X for certain people and "Y" for other people--both at the same time. Just stop that.
The "solution" is that you should have to pay tax on what you claim the rent is after a small grace period (Less than 24 months certainly. Probably less than 12 or at least prorated starting before that.).
If your financial agreement requires and claims that the rent is $5000, no problem! Then the tax authority should expect to receive the tax revenue they would expect if someone was actually paying $5,000 in rent to you. If you want to leave the space vacant even after paying the tax on the revenue--have a blast.
That would short circuit all the financialization shenanigans.
The article touches on vacancy takes, and I think this has a similar effect. As the article says, the even if you apply a tax like this, lowering the rent would still lead to foreclosure, so won't happen. So piling a tax on top might make some revenue, and it might make some operators go bust but it won't actually directly* get the property to be occupied.
* maybe if the operator goes bust, the rents on the building can be lowered with a new property value for future loans. Then perhaps it can be occupied. But that's very uncertain, especially if this happens to a whole city at once.
If the property is devalued, the property taxes lower accordingly. Portland, Oregon has been facing this problem recently. The devaluations caused the tax revenues for the city to drop, which in turn has caused budget issues.
For example, "Big Pink" is an office tower in downtown Portland. It's last sale was for about $370 million. Out of desperation in a saturated market, the owners sold it last year for about $45 million. No one - the owners, the city, or the citizens - wants to have the vicious downturn of values, and there is no easy solution. Adding a vacancy tax just exacerbates the problem.
As citizen I might prefer downturn of values. At least in medium term. Yes there is lot less tax income. But on other hand lowering values would mean lower rents which would mean lower overheads and potentially cheaper prices or more business being viable.
I'm with you there, but as far as I can tell, it hasn't impacted residential prices.
> Adding a vacancy tax just exacerbates the problem.
The point of the vacancy tax is also to prevent the over speculation before it happens. If the operators know that they are looking at having to cough up more cash than they expect in the future, they might reign in the rampant real estate speculation. If the bank knows that they might have to start coughing up cash, they'll be more inclined to actually just drop the property into bankruptcy.
Adding taxes in a downturn obviously adds additional friction. One might ask, what happened to the tax revenue of that $370M transaction, where is it now when the city needs it.
It's gone. So are many services that the city provided.
Georgism FTW
Sounds like fraud with extra steps.
Who is being defrauded?
Who even is the fraudster? The operator of the building is losing money, so clearly they're not making a gain from anyone
Somewhere in this chain are parties who are able to claim assets or collateral with values far in excess of actual market worth. To me that smells like the creditors are defrauding their counterparties.
The defrauded parties might include secondary lenders (to the property mortgage holders), regulators to whom financial instruments and solvency are being misrepresented, tenants who are paying higher-than-market rents, potential tenants who are denied market-rate rents on existing space, and arguably communities in which business and commercial opportunities are depressed due to the denial of access to real estate at market terms.
The operator of the building isn't the key point to fraud, as their interest (reducing rent to attract tenants) is actively thwarted by their creditors. The element of fraud is misrepresentation of true market value / income potential by projecting partial tenancy at elevated rates as if it were full tenancy, rather than the actual income stream at full occupancy (allowing for a nominal vacancy rate) at actually-supportable lease rates.
Yeah, I probably don’t mean fraud in the narrow criminal sense.
The thing that feels fraud-ish to me is that the loss doesn’t just disappear because nobody books it. A huge amount of capital and useful urban land is tied up preserving a fictional valuation and someone is paying for that somewhere.
Maybe it’s not a clean “X stole from Y” thing here, but it still means real businesses are displaced, worse downtowns, and less of the city that could have existed otherwise. I haven't seen this sort of thing as much in Australian cities where I'm from, but have a lot in the US where I live.
So maybe a better way phrasing "fraud on the public commons" is closer to what I mean. Everyone involved is probably acting rationally inside the system. The public still gets stuck living inside the dead space created by the fiction created by it and ends up eating that cost.
Yes, but seems unlikely to be prosecuted... The government directly benefits from higher tax valuation.
The value of a commercial building is based on the potential rent, not how much space is leased.
Loans can be called by the lender if the value of the collateral (building) falls too low.
Lowering rents lowers the building value. Not lowering rents and leaving spaces vacant ‘maintains’ the value of the building, as long as you can keeep making the loan payments everyone pretends the building is worth more money than it probably actually is. As long as the borrower keeps making payments to the lender, nobody really cares.
Seems to me that what is required to fix this is a complete overhaul of the valuation system and then tighter foreclosure protections, only foreclosing on defaults, more like residential real estate.
One element of this that I find interesting is that from the outside it can look somewhat like a decentralised monopoly given that it affects all (or most?) commercial rental properties; it looks like collusion to keep rents high. Where it's actually systemic to how commercial buildings are created in the first place: they do not account for a downturn, or at least a downturn on the scale that Covid wrought.
Store-fronts were already in decline due to 'internet shopping', but Covid probably brought a lot of physical close-down plans forward, such that any likelihood of recovery should be measured in decades or, more realistically, start being written off progressively to minimise a big hit down the track.
The longer extend and pretend lasts, the bigger the hit will be when it that strategy breaks.
I've seen a lot of this in Ithaca. They built a concrete parking garage with offices on the bottom level and for a long time it seemed like they'd only attract government offices. It took several years and they finally got a farm-to-table restaurant which is well regarded but possibly subsidized and in a category like government offices (e.g. no financial discipline about the rent)
There is a lot of talk that "there are excessive vacancies on the Ithaca Commons" but doesn't seem that bad except for the bottom of the first floor of Harold's Square, a market rate apartment development that was recently developed.
It could be 2 to 4 years to build the space. You can also structure the loan so the interest is amortized over a longer period than the loan which simply requires a balloon payment or refinancing of the interest balance at term which can offset some of the costs presented in this article.
It also does look like San Francisco has a vacant storefront tax although the penalties are fairly light.
https://abc7news.com/post/remember-vacant-storefront-tax-san...
Is this something there’s a federal lever for by forcing commercial loans to mark to market? So if I go to refi my $20M building and nothing is actually rented for 5 years, I can’t use list price and need to use market price for rent.
Or could be a shareholder lawsuit for banks as they are putting out riskier loans than the rate reflects?
I'm in Berlin where there's a glut of offices which are all sitting empty. I'm living next to a top line historic renovation/office space and it took them 8-9 years to complete the renovation at probably an astronomical cost and now it's been sitting empty for a year or so.
This financial model is also the main reason why it's so hard to convert these buildings to residential. Somebody has to eat the markdown.
The ICC? <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationales_Congress_Centr...>
I was thinking Am Tacheles but who knows
(2025).
> The obvious thing cities could try is to put more pressure on building operators to fill their spaces, but the building operators are already under a ton of pressure — they’re losing a bunch of money! So, cities could do something like put a vacant storefront tax and… make them lose even more money? If that “worked,” the mechanism would be to force a lot of commercial property to default, which could put a lot of new space on the market at lower prices, which should lower the commercial rent. But it would also hurt the banks a lot, which has a history of leading to bad consequences and subsequent bailouts.
I agree that this is the obvious remedy. I don't know if it's exactly the right answer, but it's the natural place to start the conversation, and I think it's at least in the ballpark of the right solution. It's the city (and bigger) government's job to create policies that incentivize the right behaviors for the benefit of the community. There clearly has been an oversight here, if extremely valuable commercial properties are literally just sitting unused for no good reason. In my opinion we'd all be better off if the market did correct itself, at least getting us all on the same page about what these properties are actually worth, rather than the current situation.
The city stepping in also helps put the fuckup back in the right place, in the hands of the property owners and lenders who seem to have made these bad bets, rather than externalized to the residents and business owners of the city, who haven't done anything wrong. The article suggests that this leads to "bad consequences" and even bank bailouts, but I'm pretty unconvinced that the problem is widespread enough that the federal government would literally need to start bailing out banks. From what I've seen, it's really bad in a few specific metro areas and not so much in others.
another possible remedy would be to find ways to change the conditions of the loan so that building owners can continue to pay off their loan at better rates that match the income they can make from rent.
Then you'll most likely get moral hazard. That is, rather of people acting in their own limits, as responsible business parties, they would instead be encouraged this way to make deals which they know won't be able to carry through, then after getting this metaphorical foot in the door, they'll expect "to change the conditions of the loan", i.e. beneficial intervention on their behalf (and a kind of bait-and-switch).
I'm not sure what the full elements of this are, but in a somewhat similar situation (Georgian Land Rents), an approach often proposed is that taxes be made on the stated value of the land, subject to the provision that the taxing authority may opt instead to buy the property at that value. It's possible for a landowner to lowball value, but they risk losing the property, at a below-market rate, if they do so.
(The taxing authority might hold the property itself, or turn around and sell it to a third party, at market rates.)
This seems an ingenious rule to address conflicting interests indeed. However, I don't see it applicable to many taxable goods, unfortunately. Some goods, although of high value, require operating costs even and (more importantly) expertise in order for that value to be maintained and realized. For example, a hotel is an active asset that incurs operational costs and therefore its potential acquisition prospect may be shunned by anyone not in the hospitality industry, but still, a taxing authority can make some arrangement for another actor to operate the asset on its behalf. (This I think is in fact how the rule was been thought to work, for things like arable land, where the acquired land could be sold or leased to another peasant.) This is not as easy when the need for expertise comes into play, like it would with a research lab, for example, because the research lab may be one of its kind.
Keep in mind that we're talking, in general here about typical commercial retail: storefronts, restaurant space, small markets, possibly office or light industrial space. Not highly-specialised large-scale hospitality, scientific labs, heavy industry, etc. Yes, those exist, yes, there are vacancies, but *the typical case is going to be pretty quotidian. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the sufficient.
For what it's worth, one of the specialised use-cases probably more likely to be encountered is large-volume food retail, a/k/a supermarkets or grocers. These have distinctive footprints, refrigeration, stocking capabilities, and the like. A few years ago the failure of a large regional grocery brand in the US resulted in numerous commercial vacancies of precisely this nature. There was some controversy when the successor to the chain held on to many of those parcels for years. There were still numerous vacancies at three years after final closing, several locations were demolished entirely, and the last property wasn't repurposed until six years after the original chain had failed. This despite pressure and desire to provide grocery services in the area. As the successor company was also a grocery chain (with operations in the area), stalling transfer of the properties was effectively a way of hamstringing their competition. The space wasn't easily converted to other uses (this happens, Sports Basement at the former Presidio PX in San Francisco is an example, a former A&P supermarket in NYC converted to a community center another), and food retailers hoping to expand had few other options. Notably, despite exploding vacancies in non-food retail, former strip-malls and shopping centres can't easily convert other retail space to groceries.
how is that a moral hazard if the consequence is that we avoid shops staying empty? because that's the goal from the city's perspective.
and isn't investing into a property that they then fail to rent out in a profitable manner also already a failure to act within their own limits?
"how is that a moral hazard if the consequence is that we avoid shops staying empty"
The shops staying empty is one problem. The call for bailing out or helping in any way the creditors that took loans in bad faith by relying on that kind of help (to prop them up along the way) is another problem. I very much want to address the first problem, but not by enacting perverse incentive inducing rules. A better solution (in my view), which I think was mentioned in other comments, was to disallow tax reductions for unused spaces, and maybe even rise them above the tax level for what that space is when rented. In this case the landlord may be incentivized to find ways to make their spaces (at least) look busy (if not be busy with something of real value), which may be what the cities and community think of as an improvement.
"and isn't investing into a property that they then fail to rent out in a profitable manner also already a failure to act within their own limits?"
Yes, it is "already a failure", and it was the reason behind my initial objection. The bad decisions should meet their bad consequences. A "remedy" "to find ways to change the conditions of the loan so that building owners can continue to pay off their loan" sounds to me like a measure to shield decision makers from facing their failures. It is also, in the context of imminent failure, a call for someone else to hold the bag, which is in itself unfair.
thank you, i understand that, but we also need to consider the benefit/downside for the community. i believe it is a mistake to try to punish bad actors when the consequence is that everybody else suffers too. it depends on how many bad actors there are in practice. it's better to allow a small number of bad actors than to implement rules that hinder the majority of good actors. so what is the right approach may depend on the situation locally.
If the banks would prefer to adjust their loans instead of defaulting on them I think they would just naturally do that? They may not want to take a longer loan though.
the question is, why don't they prefer that? what is influencing that decision. for the building owners, if they don't want a longer loan then that's their choice. but we want the building filled, so if forcing them to lower the rents will cause them to go bankrupt because they refuse to accept a longer loan with lower monthly payments, then that's also their choice. and if the banks don't want to offer such a loan, the question is also "why?". if there are legitimate reasons then we need to fix those. if there aren't then it's probably just greed.
If income stream is the metric, then I don't see why 'real' income stream can't be used to evaluate the value of the building instead of the last transaction. If the building sits at half occupancy, then the income stream is 500k, not a theoretical 1M.
TLDR: lowering the rent would create a direct problem for banks to convince investors the building is worth more. And since they've already given the money of the investor away (usually to construct the building in the first place), effectively the bank would have to pay back the difference if they did this.
So it's a choice between honesty and profit towards investors ...
Oh and obviously the "solution" is waiting for inflation to change the price of the rent effectively. So the real fix is for government to take the initiative and start paying people (by now, a lot) more.
There is also the practice of "deferred interest paid in kind", where vacancy is considered temporary, and the bank agrees that the interest for the term of vacancy will be paid at loan maturity. Not sure how/if it applies to multi-tenant buildings, but plenty of them aren't multi-tenant.
people like to complain about strip malls or those little office parks.
this is why those win - it's cheaper to build & maintain them & easier to turn a profit on them.
the fancy big glass downtown skyscrapers are mostly for ego.
usually the tallest one determines who has power in that economy/city.
way back then churches used to be the tallest.
now in most cities it's the banks.
in SF - it's SalesForce Tower i.e tech is dominant
Land value tax would fix this
It’s very clear there is no commercial property investors here, nor commercial borrowers.
Care to enlighten us?
Comments below.
There’s no actual problem here to be solved. If people feel they have better uses for a property they should put their money where their mouth is.
there is a problem to be solved. empty shops make shopping areas unattractive. walking through a half empty mall or shopping street is depressive.
i see this all the time in china and in developing countries in general. they build huge malls, and then they can't fill them because there are not enough businesses who can pay the rent being asked. at least there is growth and the place will fill up eventually. but until that happens the place is less attractive.
seeing the same in europe in malls or shopping streets is even worse because it feels like the economy is declining. you have to apply the broken window theory here. the more shops stay empty the less people will go there to visit the remaining shops. their revenue goes down, they can't afford the rent anymore and another shop is empty. if this becomes a trend then you risk that the shops will never come back.
it is therefore in the interest of landlords and the city to keep the streets alive and fill them with businesses that attract people.
ignoring this problem is just a sign of greed. instead of building a vibrant space they just want to extract as much money as possible.
instead of being forced to foreclose the banks should be forced to extend the loan and eat the loss. foreclosing will cause them a loss too. so the banks are not better off either way.
the article says the building is an income stream.
no, it isn't.
the building is part of a community. the needs of the community top your need to make a profit. yes, this means the community should probably contribute to make your work financially viable, and one way they can do that is by making policy that gives you more reasonable conditions to pay off your loan so that a foreclosure is not necessary.
If you think there’s a better use it’s a free market. It’s even up for lease, you don’t even need to buy it ;)
no, i can't. the rent is to high. which means the rent is not market-rate. the free market was supposed to correct that, but it doesn't, so maybe this is not a free market after all.
You’re correct in that you don’t want to transact.
Everything else is your own opinion, which of course is fine.
if my business doesn't make enough profit then i literally can't. that's not an opinion or a choice. that's a fact of life. and if noone is willing to pay that much rent whether they could afford it or not, then the rent is not market-rate. that's not an opinion. that's how market-rate is defined. it is what the market is willing to pay.
That’s the free market in action. You can’t afford something, so you don’t buy it.
You are failing to look beyond the effects of one individual transaction. No snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche.
you are missing the point, i don't care if i can buy this or not. i care that the street is attractive to people. if i do have a shop in the street (because i can actually afford it) then i care even more because if the street is not attractive then that is hurting my business.
the problem is not that i can't afford it. the problem is that NOBODY can afford it. free market rules then suggest that the value of that thing goes down and thus the price should go down too if the building owner has any interest in selling that thing.
and here is where the free market idea causes a conflict, because if they don't have an interest to sell then their interest and the city's interests are misaligned and the city should force the building-owner out.
or, you could also argue that the city itself is a market participant, because the city owns the land the shops are built on, and it leases or sells that land with specific expectations, namely that shops are built and rented out. if the renting out does not happen then the city's contract with the builder is violated and the city should have a right to take action.
Yes I understand your point - you are just a commentator with no actual interest in the matter hand. Not an owner, not a tenant, just some random stranger strolling on the street thinking other people should do something because you think it's the greater good.
Now you're proposing a different ownership model completely or that a government/city should be able to force a legal owner out of their legally owned property?
Honestly I think you need to back up and really consider what you're proposing.
i am considering what i am proposing. but i can't do that alone. throwing my ideas out there and having them critiqued with counterarguments is the point. if you just say i have no clue and my ideas are bad and i should reconsider then i am not going to learn anything. i can only reconsider if i get new input about what's wrong with my idea.
basically you act like the error in my idea should be obvious, and i should be able to figure that out by myself. well, no, because if i could, i already would have. i don't write stuff without thinking about it. it may look like that to you, but only because you seem to know something that i don't. please share.
and what do you mean by no actual interest? have i not explained my interest? do you think the interests of the people living in the city are irrelevant? only owners and tenants count? well, most certainly not. but if you do not accept that the city and its inhabitants should have an interest in this matter then our problem is that we have a fundamental disagreement in our worldview.
The error is you think you as a non-interested party you can tell people what to do.
No one’s outlined a scenario where the bank or the owner are violating some law/regulation.
Well, sort of. One scenario is to say "it is illegal to let your property be vacant (for more than X months etc. etc.)". Then suddenly all these owners are violating laws. Another is to say "it is illegal to hold more than $100 million of wealth". Then a bunch of rich people are in violation. Laws are what we make them. The point here is that the current laws are inadequate to produce the society people want to live in. You may be right that no laws are being violated currently in many cases, but that doesn't mean things are fine; it just means we need better laws.
No one is getting that law across the line in any sane country, I’m not even sure why the conversation has veered this far off-topic. Suddenly because some people here do not like commercial vacancies all of a sudden laws are changing so properties are never vacant.
Can’t wait for people here to begin arguing Elon should just sell/give up his equity because Starship hasn’t launched successfully yet.
Not everything needs to make sense to a bunch of IT peeps so, politely, either genuinely learn about commercial property or take a hike.
well i am not from a sane country i guess. keeping homes vacant is already illegal in germany in most places, and laws against vacant commercial properties are being discussed.
this is not just about how commercial property works, but this is about how urban planning works.
you keep insisting that i am a non-interested party. i am speaking for the city and the community. please explain to me how they are non-interested parties.
the needs of the community outweigh the needs of land and building owners. as an owner you are to serve the community. if you don't want to do that then you have no business being part of that community. we'll try to work with you to find an amicable solution, but if you refuse and leave your building abandoned then we can force you to sell. laws to that end already exist. they are used sparingly, but they are there if we really need them.
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real estate must be the worst thing to use as an argument for "it's a free market" - because its one of the types of things which every stock is it's own, truly unique monopoly. I can't "freely" produce the same commercial property, unless I already own that property.
Commercial property is only unique in number on a street location factor.
Plenty of the same type of commercial properties exist right next to each other, happily too.
in order to join that market you have to buy at the inflated prices on the market, since current owners refuse to sell for a loss, there's nothing you can do as an individual to make this cheaper unless you already own the land.
Location still matters, as it does for residential, proximity to employees, or customers is important.
Zoning restricts what land can do what.
There's many reasons why this isn't a "free market"
The people advocating for change in this situation likely advocated for all the impediments you’re providing as to reasons why it’s not supposedly a free market.
Someone bought an asset they could afford to hold in bad times. End of story.
There's something wrong with the structure of the market if people are holding assets they don't need that others could make better use of.
As stated earlier: it’s a free market and you’re free to make an offer of sale or lease to utilise the space.
It's actually not a free market.
Regulations apply to all markets. Crying you can’t afford something doesn’t mean it’s not free.
If it was free everyone could afford it.
I meant free as in free market but yes continue the incoherence.
How, specifically? If they refuse to acknowledge the building is worth less than they expected, they aren't going to sell it to you at a price where you can make money either.
Have you ever considered that your opinion, that it’s worth less, is incorrect?
That's another way of phrasing what I asked you to explain, without actually answering.
You’re stating the outcome - the property is worth less - without understanding how people buy/sell said property. And asking why others don’t agree?
The article outlines the methods used for the most part to the best of my knowledge, as someone who owns and deals in this space.
I think you need to lay out a better argument for why your thesis is the case when what happens in the real world mirrors what the article discusses. Not to mention people forget property can be owned without a bank/loan, nor that vacancies are expected/factored in.
You just don't have an answer, as you're still not answering.
I already intimated your assumptions are incorrect.
Markets clear at a price, pay that price. It’s just not the one you want.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305123
I have been wondering this for 25 years. Now I understand why New York City has so damn many empty buildings.
Property taxes are too low.
Capitalism tips half the milk out and triples the price for the other half.
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It all comes back to fractional reserve banking. It is the root of all evil in our financial system. If Rothbard could only see the current state of affairs...
How do you imagine people would get car loans and mortgages without fractional reserve banking? Where do banks get the money to loan out to people if they're not using the deposits from other members of the bank?
Rothbard would probably lament that we have not yet turned children into "financial products" as well.
https://mises.org/mises-daily/children-and-rights
This is a crank opinion that is somehow everywhere. The building is real, it's not fractional.
The bank lended more money than it has in reserves allowing for speculation and extra inflation of perceived value of an asset
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You do not even need fractional banking for this. Same thing could happen without it. Someone lends money and is unable to pay it back. Both sides pretend that things will eventually go well. As at least on paper they have not lost anything until prices are realised.
Without fractional banking the bank needs to be way more cautious when appraising an asset and be more conservative with the future gains estimation. Decreasing speculation and inflation of value.
That almost describes fractional banking.