11–20 of 258 posts
It 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...
> 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.
This explanation seems very implausible to me. By lowering the rent by X%, and therefore reducing annual revenue by X%, you admit the building is worth X% less. But by leaving the building X% vacant, also reducing the annual income stream by X%, you and the bank can somehow pretend the building is worth what it would be if full? I doubt owners and banks actually believe this. Is there some policy that forces this?
This explanation seems very implausible to me. By lowering the rent by X%, and therefore reducing annual revenue by X%, you admit the building is worth X% less. But by leaving the building X% vacant, also reducing the annual income stream by X%, you and the bank can somehow pretend the building is worth what it would be if full? I doubt owners and banks actually believe this. Is there some policy that forces this?
Keeping it vacant only impact current income, lowering rent impacts future forecasts.
This explanation seems very implausible to me. By lowering the rent by X%, and therefore reducing annual revenue by X%, you admit the building is worth X% less. But by leaving the building X% vacant, also reducing the annual income stream by X%, you and the bank can somehow pretend the building is worth what it would be if full? I doubt owners and banks actually believe this. Is there some policy that forces this?
How do you asses the value? You use the x last transactions. No transactions, no data, the last value remains.
There is no escaping the powers of supply and demand.
How 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 loss…
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 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)
It 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...
This is a crank opinion that is somehow everywhere. The building is real, it's not fractional.