[sarreph]

Also good point. However, while commercial spaces in general are (as you say) underutilized, my gut feel (non-empirical here) from being in large cities is that there is somewhat of a boon for hot-desking / blurred-work-life-balance "office leisure spaces".

Without having your experience of breaking a commercial lease, I would imagine one avenue to explore would be trying to offload some of these leases to emerging companies doing what I refer to above.

[londons_explore]

Sure they could offload them (commercial leases are usually transferrable/sublettable),but if you offload them for pennies on the dollar, that looks really bad on the balance sheet.

Better to keep them and tell your shareholders that this is a temporary blip, and profits will be coming any day now...