“Return to office!”
Why?
“Because otherwise these buildings we bought are worthless!”
Ok, hard pass.
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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"In that case, with our new-found leverage, we'd like to formally request a 40% pay increase and a 4-day work week to compensate for the inconvenience of propping up your failed real estate ventures. We look forward to your affirmative response."
That'd be a lot easier with some sort of collective group that could make such a deal.
You want to bargain collectively? Presenting a united front? What would you even call such a thing?
"Socialism!"
Somehow, when people talk about "the government overregulating things", they never mean the insane amount of regulation in place in the US to prevent effective collective labour action.
I just realized something. Making people work in expensive office buildings is how the rich extract more wealth from the working class.
How can I get more money? Start a business! Perfect. Now how can I get more money from that? Well ... If I owned an office building, then I could rent office space to the business. But what is the business going to do with an office building? Ohhhh, the business, that I own, or am the majority shareholder in, the business in which I make all the decisions, could decide that employees have to come into the office. That I rent to the business, because I own the office building.
There's also the businesses nearby that serve the workers in the office building. Supposedly one of the reasons Amazon has pushed so hard on RTO is a lot of their executives have personal investments in those businesses and without Amazon workers in the area they were taking in way less money. When you happen to own the restaurant across the street it's in your interest to force your coworkers back into the office.
Interest rates were so low for so long, people tried to find other ways to grow their money.
Hey you want to borrow what is essentially free money to buy a building in charge tenants? It's a safe investment, right, there's no reason why businesses would stop needing office space, right,...right right.
And of course it goes deeper than that too. Even if a company doesn't have any real skin in the game as far as owning The real estate, shutting down the offices makes for some colossal problems. If your stuff's not already in the cloud you need to migrate everything. It changes secure networks, where do you meet with clients, when you don't have that huge beautiful branded space with a magnificent mahogany table in your conference room how do you impress your clients? Where do you have your new hardware shipped? Does your IT team now just store hundreds of thousands of dollars of hardware in their house? How much are you going to lose when you auction off all the furniture?
This of course can all be overcome and answered but it's not easy. It's also not easily reversible.
Most of management cares a lot less that people are working from home and cares a lot more about having to decommission the actual offices because it's strategic and financial nightmare fuel.
The company I work for reduced our office space from 3 floors of the building to 1, started leasing out the other two, and now maintains only a few conference rooms for client meetings and similar functions, the server rooms and IT space, and a very small set of communal workspaces for people who want or need to work from the office.
Point being, there're always options less extreme than "Sell the entire building!".
We're in a larger building we don't own. Keeping one floor for the 5 people a week that come in is kinda insane. We need to move, but it's a shit sandwich, place is beautiful,
How does buying and renting an expensive office building to yourself extract wealth from the working class?
it raises the productivity requirements of the business to exist without actually returning any of the same money to the pockets of workers. Its similar to your boss owning your apartment and billing you for rent. You work harder, make less money and your boss makes more.
Its why there should be limits on the creation of shell companies and real estate trusts.
it raises the productivity requirements of the business to exist
I don't understand what this means? You mean the business has to make more money to pay the rent? Why would that obligation be necessary to "increase productivity requirements?".
yes the business has to sell more product to rent a place than buy it, generally. This is why venture capital often does exactly this when they buy a corporation - they seperate all the real estate to a shell company and raise rents, which lowers profits for the original company forcing managers to try to extract more from workers to maintain profits and prevent closures.
I want to say this is exactly what happened to albertsons and the cut that gets made is a reduction in wage increases.
which lowers profits for the original company forcing managers to try to extract more from workers to maintain profits and prevent closures.
That makes no sense. Why would you fabricate running costs of a business that the employees or managers will never see or care about?
If they sold these properties and these costs suddenly disappeared, are managers going to suddenly allow their employees to slack off because they "don't need" that much money? No. There's no such thing as "enough money" in a corporate environment.
This sounds a whole lot like a made-up conspiracy theory.
So explain why this is one of the many things Cerberus did after it bought albertsons-safeway and one of the resulting actions taken was to axe the pension program?
I can't. I don't know anything about that.
so why call people conspiracy theorists?
Because your explanation makes no sense
Yet it describes a real scenario that exists.
Maybe you'd like to explain it?
My understanding: In the case of Cerberus they wanted the original company to look less profitable' Afaik this is one of many accounting trick to make the portion of the business with the most negotiable costs (such as labor) as unprofitable as possible on paper so they can justify things like pension cuts. By splitting it up it obfuscates the finances to the unions and gives a negotiating advantage without really damaging investor profits and they can then sell the now more risky corporation off while keeping the real estate as part of their portfolio.
Like its not always this blatant and there's also some tax incentives and other things mixed in there but overall the goal of most businesses since the 80s is to move more money from wages ---> profits. If they can consolidate the market a little as well, that's bonus. "Competition is sin" after all.
Because it is paid for with labor value that was stolen from the working class.
I don't understand what this means?
Or maybe don't return to office and then they can sell the building and recover some lost equity?
My current employer did just that -- sold the space, sold the desks, and then enshrined remote work in the union contract.
Since they weren't tied to an office, people could work from anywhere the privacy and security regs allowed. That's the entire country. Turn-over is incredibly slow, but we can now pull from a national talent pool for a 100%WFH job. Competition is gonna heat up.
Lucky they found a buyer
Commercial real estate loans are interest only? I had never heard of that before, but it makes sense with the buried lede:
borrowers prefer handing the property keys over to creditors over putting good money after bad
Which is what happens whenever a company has an asset they don't own and no longer want. Shrug and handover the keys. Seems to me like the lenders are going to be the ones taking the haircut, despite what the article asserts.
The lenders are the banks...sounds like an '08 again.
Yep and it will end in massive public giveaway in free loan money to retrofit buildings to something useful, like residential(yes I know of the challenges but there is no better option). Even progressive cities are fucked because their downtown cores that they sold gladly sold out or allowed to be developed out from under their constituents have almost all their tax dollars coming from CRE so they are levered to pro up CRE.
There is at least one other option: Vertical Farming. I saw one of these in San Francisco go up, but there's quite a few cities trying it out:
As far as I can tell everyone who has tried this has failed. The energy for the grow lights is too expensive.
Also it would require changing commercial buildings to industrial. I'm not an expert on this but soil weighs a lot so unless these are plant nurseries I would expect its a more expensive transition than than residential as we're talking adding like forklift elevators and drains to everything.
I hope they'll do retrofits. I wonder what that would do to the housing market. If it actually made housing affordable a huge chunk of investors and home owners would be royally pissed. Great way to decrease homelessness, and I might be able to afford a house, but I doubt they'll do it for that and previous reasons.
The other sad part is it answers many problems on traffic and congestion by doing what most countries do to enable density; build up not out with incredible efficiency gains. There are many social benefits as well and in a society that struggles with depression and loneliness as much as America, hard to think of a solution that solves as many problems as taking empty buildings and adding affordable housing.
They're called balloon loans. They're pretty common for mortgages anywhere outside the US. Instead of paying principal plus interest each period, you only pay the interest. At the end of the term, you pay the principal itself.
They also can't just hand the keys back unless it's in the original contract or the bank agrees. If a lot of companies are choosing to ditch their properties, the banks will choose to refuse this option.
🎻
Time to stop eating all that avocado toast!