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.
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 financial model is also the main reason why it's so hard to convert these buildings to residential. Somebody has to eat the markdown.
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.
>> 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 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...
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.
Who even is the fraudster? The operator of the building is losing money, so clearly they're not making a gain from anyone
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I don’t enjoy dealing with property management or the fees they charge.
Keeping it vacant only impact current income, lowering rent impacts future forecasts.
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.
Congratulations, you have just described high finance.
* 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.
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.
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'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.
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.
There is no escaping the powers of supply and demand.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you’re levered up to the eyeballs you don’t want your bank reviewing your file.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In yesterday’s mailbag post, Matthew Yglesias responded to a question about why commercial spaces sometimes sit vacant for years at a time. Matthew’s answer started off on the right track, then veered off course. So, as one does, I quickly fired off a note in response.
That note went (and is still going) more viral than anything else I’ve written this year. Fun! There were a lot of questions for clarification, and a few asks for me to expand this into a post.
So here’s an expanded version of the note. For any email subscribers who didn’t see the note, I hope this is interesting. I have a feeling that a more complete explanation won’t be as viral as the short note, but for those who found the note compelling I hope you’ll share this article widely and give others something to bookmark.
To start, here’s the question that inspired this post:
Can you explain why it makes economic sense for landlords in high-priced metros to keep commercial real estate empty for years at a time? … I understand there's a lot of social pressure on landlords to keep rents high or face the wrath of their neighbors, but how can that pressure still work after ten years of losses?
The short answer is both simple and surprising: in many cases, lowering the rent on a building will force the bank to foreclose on it.
Foreclosure is very bad for both the bank and the operator, so both parties would rather “extend and pretend,” leaving the building vacant while they wait and hope for the market to change.
This seems absurd. Surely everyone would be better off it they just lowered the rent and got some use out of the building — getting some rent must be better than getting no rent, right?
Intuition fails because normal people think of a building as a building, when in the majority of cases, a building is not a building, but a financial product. Behavior that makes no sense for buildings can make perfect sense for a financial product.
To understand this I’ll offer a simplified explanation of commercial real estate, and the “extend and pretend” dilemma.1
The first reason our intuition fails us is that very few normal people buy and sell building-sized financial products — or financial product sized buildings. But most of us will buy or sell a home, or know people who have. This gives us some intuitions about how “property” works:
The value is mostly determined by the market — roughly, whatever someone else would be willing to pay for it.
Home mortgages are mostly based on the purchaser’s ability to pay.
Thanks to extensive federal government programs2, most residential mortgages are long-term amortized, meaning they’re designed to be fully paid off by regular payments over time.
These ideas lead us astray, because none of this applies to the commercial, or “income-producing” market. For commercial property:
The value is determined by the income the building will produce.
The loan is based on the building’s ability to pay.
Loans are typically short-term balloon notes, meaning they are _not_designed to be fully paid off by regular payments over time.
Let’s walk through a toy example to explain how these three factors can lead to an “extend and pretend” situation.
The story starts with a building operator and a bank deciding what a building is worth. To figure this out, the operator is going to make a financial model that projects the income that a building will generate.
First, the operator forecasts that the net rent (after expenses) will be $1M per year.
Second, the operator assumes a Capitalization Rate (or “cap rate”) for the building. In plain English, the cap rate is what percentage of the buildings total value it will generate in income each year. So, if we say the cap rate is 5%, that means the building will generate 5% of its total value as income each year.
The operator forecast the building will generate $1M a year in net rent, if that’s 5% of the value, then the value is $1M / 0.05 = $20M.
If that’s confusing, another way to think of the cap rate is the “payback time” for the investment — 100 / cap rate (as an integer) is payback time: 100 / 5 = 20 year payback.
You may wonder how the cap rate is determined3, the simple answer is the owner and the bank negotiate and agree on a number.
The important thing to understand here is that the actual building is not an important part of the value calculation. We’re not really looking at the replacement cost, the unique design, the amenities, the location, etc. Those things influence the assumptions about the gross rent we can get, or the cost of operating the building (higher cost means less net rent), but at the end of the day it isn’t the building that has value, it’s the income stream.
We’ve decided that our income stream (aka building) is worth $20M, now let’s make a loan.
Banks are highly regulated, so they can’t just loan whatever they want. The government insists that banks keep high margins of safety in their portfolio, and commercial loans are risky, so the terms they can offer are designed to limit risk.
First, the loan term will be shorter than a residential mortgage, anywhere from 5-20 years, with most in the 5-10 year range. Second, the bank must keep a strict loan to value ratio - so they won’t lend more than 80% of the value of the building (and often less than that).
For this example, let’s assume the bank offers an 80% LTV loan, with a 5-year term, interest-only at 4%.
That means the building operator has to pay $4M, and gets $16M from the bank, to buy the building for $20M. They then have to pay $640k in interest every year, and in five years they have to either pay off the $16M balance, or refinance it. (The plan will be to refinance.)
The operator buys the building and gets to work filling it with tenants.
Now suppose that 3 years into this project it turns out the building operator was wrong, there isn't enough demand at the building's high rent, so the building is 50% vacant.
Half empty, the building is only generating $500k per year in net income instead of $1M.
The owner is paying $640k in interest, therefore losing $140k per year operating the building. That sucks, surely he should lower the rent, right?
Let’s imagine the owner lowers the rent by 30% to fill the building.
Now the net rent is $700k. The owner is still paying $640k on the loan, therefore earning $60k per year. So everyone is better off, right?
Wrong!
Remember, the building isn’t a building, it’s an income stream. Before, the operator and the bank had a model that said the operator would be able to make $1M per year. Now, reality has proven the operator can only make $700k per year.
700k per year is not worth $20M. Given our agreed-upon cap rate of 5%, this proven $700k per year income stream is only worth $700k/0.5 =$14M.
In this scenario, the building has proven to only be worth $14M, but the operator owes $16M to the bank, so he is now $2M underwater on the loan. In two more years he’ll have to pay off the full $16M, and he doesn’t have that much cash, so he’ll need to refinance.
Since the building (income stream) is worth $14M, and the bank can only lend 80% LTV, the maximum new loan will be $11.2M, meaning the owner has to put another $16M - $11.2M = $4.8M cash in to keep the building.
The hard truth at this point is the operator overpaid, and the most logical thing to do would be to walk away from the building and lose the $4M he invested. And that really sucks for the operator.
It also really sucks for the bank, because the bank now has an asset (the loan) they paid $16M for and can only sell for $14M, so the bank is also taking a $2M loss in this scenario.
The thing is, both the operator and the bank can do this math too, so they know this is coming and want to avoid it.
When year five rolls around and the loan on the building comes due, both the original bank and the owner would like to avoid losing a combined $6M. And so long as the operator can afford to keep losing $140k per year on the building… they can!
What they need to do is stick to the original model. Don’t lower the rent. Just claim that there was a blip in the market, nobody could have seen that coming, it’s all going to be fine.
The bank can offer the operator to extend the loan on the original terms, based on the original model, and give income stream more time to materialize.
The only sticking point here is that the building operator is still losing $140k per year. But remember that if he gives up, he loses the $4M he’s already put into the building. Even if he ended up paying $140k per year for 10 years before things turned around, losing $1.4M is still better than losing $4M.
So both the operator and the bank have a lot of incentive to extend and pretend, rather than lower the rent and face the consequences of having overpaid for the building.
In Andrew Miller’s restack he asked if I could add “some thought about an alternative to the status quo, because the situation we have is CLEARLY suboptimal.”
Honestly, I don’t think there’s a simple fix here. Financialization means we have way more capital available to build much bigger and nicer buildings than we did in the past. But it turns buildings into financial products. It’s not obvious to me that we could stop that without also killing the supply of capital to build and buy large buildings. I can’t guess how that would play out, so I also can’t say if it would be worth it.
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’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!
The original note sparked a lot of questions, so I’ll answer a few more variations on this here.
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.
Your response makes sense for big commercial buildings, but I thought the core of the question to Matt was just about retail frontage - typically only the bottom floor of a multistory residential building.
Sometimes mixed use buildings are condominiumized such that the retail and residential portions are separately owned and have separate financing, so the same logic applies. I don’t know what percentage of mixed use buildings take that approach though.
My understanding is that in mixed use buildings “financed whole” the retail portion is seen as more of an amenity cost for the residents - like having a pool or a gym. I would guess that in such buildings owners would want a tenant the residents like and wouldn’t be too sensitive about the rent. That seems like a better arrangement — but again I don’t really know how prevalent different financing structures are among that building type.
CJ noted that “in places like Seattle and SF and LA the city requires these retail spots and a lot of developers just don’t even think about them when deciding whether something pencils. And then an equal amount of effort goes into renting them.” That sounds right to me.
Does “extend and pretend“ really account for commercial properties that sit empty for 10+ years?? There are a bunch near my home in West L.A. that have been vacant for a very very long time.
Maybe! “Extend and Pretend” is common in any situation where the developer or operator has overpaid for property. So, think of properties bought right before a recession (or pandemic). But, this isn’t the only reason that properties sit vacant.
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. If that was part of the terms of the loan, than it could also be that the building operator just can’t find a qualified tenant, and again as long as the operator can keep covering the loss it is better for both the operator and the bank to let the space sit vacant than to blow up the financing.
Actual commercial real estate professionals could give you many more reasons than I can — there are many, many possible explanations for why any particular retail or commercial space is struggling. But “the financial model made assumptions that haven’t pan out” is often the reason behind unintuitive outcomes.
Thanks for reading! If you liked this explanation more than the short note, please share it and help this post reach more people.
Note that I am not a commercial real estate professional (yet!), and I’m ignoring a lot of real world complexity. I think this explanation is accurate enough to be useful in helping curious normal people understand what’s going on, but if you are commercial real estate professional please give me grace, and let me know in the comments if I should clarify or correct any mistakes.
I asked Perplexity to find me a good summary of all the ways the government supports the mortgage market, and I think what it generated was pretty good. As with all AI-generated content, take it with a grain of salt and read the linked citations to get the full picture.
When I took real estate finance classes in graduate school, cap rates drove me crazy because they’re always explained with a circular definition. Ie, the first example they give is to look at a building and say “well it pays back 5% of its value every year, so the cap rate is 5%.” But then the second example is to say “The value of the building is income / cap rate.” But that’s a circle! That’s just saying “the value is the value!” At some point I realized this explanation is just wrong. The cap rate is not real it’s an assumption about what a certain kind of building, in the current market, ought to pay back every year. “An office building _ought_to generate 7% of its value every year.” The person selling a building will argue for a lower cap rate (higher value), and the person buying will argue for a higher cap rate (lower value). Neither is wrong or right, it’s just a compressed way of expressing how much value you assign to the income stream a building does (or might) produce.
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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.
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.
They don't want to disrupt the flow or trigger contract clauses, so they cover the missing cashflow from elsewhere.
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.
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.
AND I’m also saying I’m tired of non-experts giving their theories on this particular phenomenon, since they never make much sense.
Why wouldn't that happy cycle work with the husband ?
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.
> 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.
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.