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I posted this a few months back and it is still anecdotal but in the Houston metroplex I have noticed a significant amount of commercial for lease signs and it seems to be increasing with time. That is concerning because commercial real estate is often built on credit (mortgages) then the tenant's payments go to pay the loans. When occupancy goes down, the ability to pay that loan goes down until its unsustainable and it goes into default.
If you default on you home loan of say $300,000, its your problem and the bank has recourse and gets your asset. When a commercial loan of $5,000,000 defaults and no one was renting it already, the bank gets the asset but it's not "worth" anything other than the building/land and it is harder for the bank to recoup that value.
When that happens en-masse, that's a problem for the bank... Which makes it a problem for the economy, and it becomes a problem for all of us. This has been going on for a while and no one is doing anything about it. The cliff looks to be approaching.
I've noticed the same. But weirdly they are also building more industrial buildings, just in different areas. I assume because it's cheaper to build a new building than to deal with an old 40 year old one.
It's going to be a global quagmire. France is basically underwater and the EU probably isn't strong enough to bail them out. China still has property finance problems, even if they did a good job keeping it out of the news.
People have been doing something about it. That's what all the weird return to office intiatives were about. City governements are scared that the downtowns will spiral into collapse so they coerce all the companies that still have downtown offices to get their employees back and spending money at restaurants and such. If the restaurants go out of business and store fronts sit vacant, then there would be no reason for companies to pay a premium for downtown office space and the whole thing collapses Detroit style. Commercial real estate failed to price in remote work, and the covid shutdowns made it obvious just how overpriced and overleveraged it all was.
Biden was trying to get commercial property owners to convert empty office space into apartments, so that was an attempt to correct it.
I never saw any policies on this, do you have an example?
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/10/27/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-takes-action-to-create-more-affordable-housing-by-converting-commercial-properties-to-residential-use/
Wow that all sounds amazing.
I really wish any of it had happened 😭
It was less of a policy, more of a suggestion that went nowhere IIRC. The issue is that commercial property is difficult to convert to residential due to plumbing and building standards (state and zoning laws).
For example, you could never put a residencal floor in the empire state building (or any other tall office building) because you would have to gut the building to put in enough toilets to meet regulations and that would likely be too costly for a landlord to consider.
It's not just toilet regulations though, its like volume of water from showers, sinks, and shitting that is much higher for residential buildings. Even assuming that no one has in unit laundry.
Online shipping has been killing brick and mortar for years, and the pandemic stepped that into high gear.