Anyone here adept w/ real estate market concepts? Especially commercial?

[RiverguyVT]

I've wondered about this, and don't think it has been discussed here. No easy answer, really. (Or, maybe there is!)

RVA's state-level employees all went home to work due to covid. Ditto businesses everywhere. Many have returned, but not all have. Many are now permanently "WFH" (work from home) employees. Private corporations -banks, insurance companies, etc. can simply just not renew a lease on a multistory downtown high rise (see recent discussions re: Twitter).

But what of the federal government? Those folks aren't coming back from their Fairfax McMansions.

Youngkin tried to address this on a local VA level by "forcing" all agencies to report back to their down town offices.

An alternative would be just to put all that office inventory on the market. But wouldn't that huge supply glut just crash all real estate values? Wouldn't this in turn really wreck some banks more than they already have been? Economic consequences would be disastrous, I would think.

So here I am sounding Keynesian. Do we just let the governments (federal, state, local) keep paying rents on properties so as to not wreck the market? Yipes. Baby-bathwater. Good money after bad, and all that.

Look at D.C. Miles of empty offices. And you are paying for janitors, electricity, A/C, security, etc etc etc for them to stay empty.

On the bright side, maybe this is how a President Trump would spread the agencies out and bust up the DC-beltway shenanigans. Work from home? Okay! To Des Moines for you! To Manhattan, KS with you! Birmingham, AL! And you? To Los Cruces, NM.

I used to chuckle that China has all these empty skyscrapers. Now we do too.

I disagree with some of this article. This isn't a Biden thing. This is just where we are now (I could say it is China/Fauci's fault, and that was on Trump's watch). Also, remote employees aren't truly "not working" as the article implies (Lay them off!), but I'd guess a higher percent of the government employees are gold bricks than the private sector ones...

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/20 ... dings.html