Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
freerange.city
Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
1–10 of 258 posts
Re: Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
#2I 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.
Re: Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
#3I 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 manageme…
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.
Re: Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
#4It 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...
Re: Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
#5TLDR: 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.
Re: Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
#6I 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 manageme…
So, wework? :o)
Re: Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
#7How 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.
Re: Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
#8It 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...
Rothbard would probably lament that we have not yet turned children into "financial products" as well.
Re: Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
#9How 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 leas…
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.
Re: Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
#10The "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.