https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-one-saw-coming-kevin-133000274.html
“No one saw this coming,” entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary said in a recent interview with Larry Kudlow of Fox Business. And O’Leary believes the issue will manifest itself in the regional banking sector. “These banks are going to fail,” he said, “because up to 40% of their portfolios … are in commercial real estate.”
In the town I live in now, there's a glut of empty commercial real estate that's been a problem BEFORE covid. Do you think this would be enough to convince people to lower commercial rent? Nope, they increased rent and just let the buildings stand empty 🙄 Has this convinced people to stop building more commercial real estate? Nope, they even filled a patch of local wetland (maybe a few acres that also had the railroad running through it, it's been fucked for a while after residential filled in a lot of it anyway).
It feels like the current generation of the local gentry learned from their petite bourgeois dads that the way to make it and keep things stable is to invest in commercial real estate and so they decided to do that absent any evidence or forethought.
If you just leave it standing empty, you can write the losses off and avoid paying taxes on all the other money you're stealing from workers.
And they always write off losses as unpaid rent instead of maintenance costs