US offices are sitting empty – business owners will have to adapt • Hacker News Board

Re: US offices are sitting empty – business owners will have to adapt

#91

Post by bombcar » Sun, Jul 30, 2023, 9:04 PM UTC

jareklupinski wrote: post #57

leetrout wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few malls are trying this. I called my local mall to use their little event space (think 60 folding chairs and a podium in a 900 sqft box). No call back. I am continually surprised at how hard it is to find a place to hold a small meetup in the evenings

a group i knew found success by renting out dance studios (even day-of in a major city, they usually had a couple hours free in the afternoon/evening), and bringing cheap plastic folding tables/chairs (the kinds you use for picnics) with them not something you'd use for formal business meetings, but definitely hackable up as your budget allows

School gyms and parish halls are also options, especially if you have a personal connection to one.

Re: US offices are sitting empty – business owners will have to adapt

#92

Post by bombcar » Sun, Jul 30, 2023, 9:09 PM UTC

vr46 wrote: post #56

About three or four years ago, I asked the owners of a closed-down department store if we could turn a big chunk of the 4-5 storey section into a climbing wall and was told to F-off as they had bigger plans for a new commercial centre with mixed-work and retail. Anyway, it’s still shuttered, so good luck with that plan.

They do not want to deviate from the standard because it might possibly threaten something, so they're very conservative.

Find one that's willing to have a Spirit Halloween store in it and you might find them more receptive.

Re: US offices are sitting empty – business owners will have to adapt

#93

Post by bombcar » Sun, Jul 30, 2023, 9:10 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #72

dageshi wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might ultimately be the banks who are in trouble. "For an office landlord, abandoning a building can be the best of bad options. Commercial mortgages on offices are usually structured as “nonrecourse” loans, which means that only the building is forfeited in a default. " https://www.curbed.com/article/nyc-office-real-estate-rechle... This is a great article on the situation in New York, I highly recommend it.

> It might ultimately be the banks who are in trouble. Commercial real estate landlords keep saying that, in hopes of a bailout. Whether it's a real problem for banks remains to be seen. It's a slow problem, and banks can generally deal with slow problems.

Banks can also do silly accounting tricks, like claiming the $1m building is the same as the $1m loan they foreclosed on, and carefully not update it or worry about cashflow.

Re: US offices are sitting empty – business owners will have to adapt

#94

Post by bombcar » Sun, Jul 30, 2023, 9:13 PM UTC

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #70

errantmind wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This depends on other conditions being good as well, like being bike/pedestrian friendly and reasonably safe. There's no amount of new homes they could build that would revitalize Houston's downtown because it sucks. Most of the people I know who live and work inside the loop go out of their way to avoid downtown. I live adjacent to downtown and haven't been there for anything, including events, for years.

A reason downtown Houston may “suck” is because there are too few homes and thus it becomes a wasteland on the weekends and evenings. Mixed use districts with high density of residential will draw in stores, nightlife venues, and restaurants. It will also drive demand for bike and mass transit. Moreover, there are many urban downtowns that don’t “suck’, such as Boston and NYC that are still facing a challenging comme…

Downtowns have been revitalized and saved, it's quite possible and there are examples.

Often it involves something like building a stadium or convention center or other attraction, which makes dwelling units nearby desirable.

San Diego's gaslamp quarter is an example.

Re: US offices are sitting empty – business owners will have to adapt

#95

Post by bombcar » Sun, Jul 30, 2023, 9:14 PM UTC

softwaredoug wrote: post #88

cududa wrote: post #66

In my city, an office building was converted to an apartment. The windows don’t open, given it’s an old apartment building. The AC has been out for two weeks. Not at all saying we should let office buildings stay vacant, just, never considered how much it would suck to not be able to open windows. https://fox8.com/news/unbearable-residents-in-lakewood-high-...

Are we the baddies? > unfortunately modern HVAC systems work off a computer motherboard. Apparently, through zero fault of ours, that motherboard was fried by an electrical surge.

Often the computer is just to make it more efficient, it should be designed to have a low-efficiency backup control mechanism that is simply "on/off" on a basic mercury thermostat.

Re: US offices are sitting empty – business owners will have to adapt

#96

Post by ambrose2 » Sun, Jul 30, 2023, 9:15 PM UTC

bcrosby95 wrote: post #10

seydor wrote: post #9

Hm ... how about we tax work from home? Like, tax homes for doubling as office space. I think it's a brilliant idea

You might be joking but we already tax the extra space you need for work from home because the larger amount of space results in a more expensive home.

Except I’ve already been in a 1 bedroom apt since before COVID and I’m still stuck working remotely because people don’t want to go into the office.

Re: US offices are sitting empty – business owners will have to adapt

#97

Post by HWR_14 » Sun, Jul 30, 2023, 9:24 PM UTC

latchkey wrote: post #71

EMM_386 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you overcome that? It will lower itself naturally. Less people in office buildings means less foot traffic to stores, which means less fewer stores will be enticed to rent. If nobody's renting, eventually the owners and investors will have to realize some rent is better than no rent, even if it means they are going to take a loss. Then rents start dropping back to earth.

That doesn't mean the people will come back to support those businesses though. In the case of SF, since there is only office space downtown and almost zero housing, this is going to be a problem of finding tenants than it is about lowering rents. Who's going to want to open a retail space where there is no foot traffic?

The usual solution to that is that someone (maybe the owner of many buildings in an area) finds several tenants to open at the same time, and thus tries to produce a retail destination. So no one wants to open a bar near 30 empty offices, but if I tell you I am getting 4 restaurants, 3 art galleries, another bar and a theater to all open in the same area than you all can feed off each other. Or instead of a lot of little things, tries to get one big draw to open. You can imagine that opening a bar next to a movie theater is better than not near one.

Re: US offices are sitting empty – business owners will have to adapt

#98

Post by HWR_14 » Sun, Jul 30, 2023, 9:30 PM UTC

tekla wrote: post #7

zeroCalories wrote: post #6

I think one thing people aren't considering is how remote work makes people more easily substitutable. Why live in SF if you can live in a small Colorado town? Why pay for a remote developer in SF when you could pay for a remote developer in Arizona? Why hire in the U.S when you can get a good dev in South America? There used to be a geographic monopoly on labor, but making remote the norm moves us away from that. Ma…

This is what programmers wanted right? The right to work from wherever they wanted. Except, that includes cheap areas where salary requirements tend to be much lower and pushes down wages.

Not everyone. I'm smart enough to want to limit my competition.

Re: US offices are sitting empty – business owners will have to adapt

#99

Post by phpisthebest » Sun, Jul 30, 2023, 9:50 PM UTC

nkrisc wrote: post #51

jnwatson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno. I don’t need a cement plant on my block.

No, but a restaurant and grocery store around the corner would nice.

Nope I prefer cheap food and a large selection at a Large Kroger or Walmart then expensive food and limited options from a corner NYC style "bodega"

as do most people that live in the suburbs which is why suburbs are not "walk-able" because people leave the cities to escape walkablity

I dont want to walk anywhere but from my front door to my car

Re: US offices are sitting empty – business owners will have to adapt

#100

Post by jlokier » Sun, Jul 30, 2023, 10:08 PM UTC

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #54

Everybody is talking about office spaces being empty, but at least in my area the office rent is at all time high which doesn't seem to hint people are using office less(unless office has been repurposed to something else which I don't know about).

In my town, most office rents are all time high and there are a lot of empty units, at the same itme. It's been like this for years, even before Covid.

However, in the few years before Covid there were more spaces advertised than there are now, and that number went up a little in 2020. But now, there's not much on the local the market, even tbough I can see plenty of empty buildings when I walk around.

We have a lot of landlords here who, I'm told, don't care that much about the rent, which is also why they don't try particularly hard to entice tenants. It can be remarkably hard to rent a space even when it's been empty for years and advertised as available, as the agents come up with all sorts of reasons and incompetencies. I am part of an organisation that tried to rent a business unit that was advertised and which we'd been enthusiastically shown around, and after a year of trying we gave up on it because we just couldn't get sane responses from the agent. The unit was still empty when we gave up on it.

There are quite a few that are not advertised but have been empty for years. Some of those are actually available, but you have to talk with property agents and ask for the lists of properties they have on file which are available if you really want to pursue them, but are not advertised. If you don't know, you don't know.

I currently rent a small office in a larger office building. The rent I'm paying is relatively low for the area, but it's inching up citing "market rates", i.e. high, even though most of the units in the building how now been empty for multiple years.

The property agent told me my particular landlord doesn't really care about the rent as they have other long-term plans for the building. So it's disappointing they still charge as much as they do for that rent they don't really care about. I'd love to take the empty unit next door to expand my office; it's likely to remain empty for another year anyway.

I was told a few years ago, before Covid, this dynamic is for two reasons. (1) The big landlords often prefer to hold out for a large, higher-paying tenant with a long lease, even if it means no rent for a year or two by turning down lower-paying tenants meanwhile. This makes little sense to me as they could presumably offer flexible terms where they can give notice at any time, but hey I'm not a landlord. And (2) some of them intend to wait for the building to be empty for long enough (20 years) that they eventually obtain automatic permission to demolish the building and replace it with a new build, either apartments or a new building with more floors and maximum footprint. I don't know if either of these reasons are true.