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by sjtgraham 2291 days ago
Arguably it's in the interest of the landlords to make this work. If WeWork goes under there will be a ton of void commercial space. It's a question of how many lease payments to forgive before it makes sense (and is actually viable) to repossess the buildings and replacement tenants.
4 comments

There’s going to be a lot of empty space.

The land owners did it to themselves pushing for tighter building codes and zoning. No one built, rent went up, the economy got more fragile because people on the bottom had absolutely nowhere to go. Now they’re going to pay for it (except the ones that saw this coming, I know the building I live in just got sold a few days ago...)

I’ve been saying for years that the housing market is irrational and that most of the US should be building more. Not that my opinion means anything but I also wasn’t the only person saying this.

This thread is about commercial real estate, not residential. And certainly not about your apartment building.
I don't think there is going to be a big demand for large commercial premises for a while. Even after this virus goes away, we are still most likely going be in a recession. Many knowledge workers (and maybe more importantly their managers) will have realised they can actually work from home.

The alternative is the landlords try to rent these spaces as co-working spaces themselves, but demand for that is going to drop too - which is the issue in the first place.

If it's on "interest of the landlords" to make it work, then it will fail. And they will end up with the bill.
I guess if anybody's going to bail out the criminals at WeWork, then, it'll be the landlords.