[pinebox]

The article never hints at a business or regulatory angle. The author repeatedly has no answer for the sudden (and often long-term) closures.

After the first anecdote about the couple getting evicted shortly after spending weeks of 12-16 hour days cleaning a derelict property I thought it was just some asshole miser stealing sweat equity from would-be proprietors, but the larger picture seems more like mental illness than pure avarice.

[mapt]

A break even business sitting on high value property is just as valuable closed as it is open, and it appreciates in value the more restrictions are piled on development of scarce local real estate.

The mental health theory aside, this may be why these... Eclectic... Business decisions end up being tolerable. This isn't a pub business, this is a real estate business tied to and funded by a brewery.

Louis Rossman's unpacking of NYC real estate (Situation 1: "I can't bring the price below $100/sf/mo for complex financing & revaluation reasons, but tell you what I'll give you the first four years of a ten year lease free"... Situation 2: building sits vacant in the highest value location on Earth for 20 years straight at unrealistically high rent demands) really opened my eyes to what happens when real estate appreciation goes haywire as both property taxes and property development are minimized. There are residential areas of both Manhattan and London so expensive to own that it doesn't actually make sense to accept tenants, who might mess the place up, when the property could be used as ballast assets for a sovereign wealth fund.

[vidarh]

London's Centre Point, when it was built one of the tallest buildings in the country, and in one of the most central locations possible, stood empty for 6 years after it was finished because the owner would rather keep it empty while waiting for the market to match his price rather than drop his asking price, due to the long leases.

More recently, large parts of prime real estate rates that next to my local station, which is one of the busiest in the UK, has remained undeveloped for 20+ years because it's better for the developers to wait for the land to appreciate and slowly build out bit by bit to release capital than develop it all at once.

As long as you expect prices to keep going up, it's great leverage: You take investment only to acquire the land, and then when you sell your first take much shorter term finance to construct buildings and get returns on a multiple on the land value, while simultaneously artificially constraining the supply

[mapt]

In a democracy, you would do something like tax this real estate, heavily, for the benefit of the people living in this locale. Hand it back out to these locals ("biological human voters") as free services, goods, or cash as you prefer.

In inhabited buildings, that gets passed on to the residents. In uninhabited buildings, it comes straight out of the investors ("land-hoarders").

[User23]

> for complex financing & revaluation reasons

It’s really not. Landlord can’t cut the rent because commercial real estate values are based on cap rate. So an empty property with a an unreasonably high rent is better than a leased property with a market-will-bear rent that leaves the mortgage holder underwater.

[mapt]

Yes, I understand that. Now.

If you're not embedded in finance, though? To the rest of us? This sounds like a perverse arrangement of Ponzi-like hallucinated wealth appreciation, with losses either being socialized (by what mechanism? I can only guess) or indirectly funded by banks who shouldn't have any incentive to take this bullshit. Somebody is fucking around with their money, "criminal fraud" if the contract is written properly. It shouldn't work.

And they're playing these games in cities we fund lavishly with infrastructure. Cities that are allowed to set their own property taxes as needed. Cities full of voters that are not investors.

[teractiveodular]

Most of these pubs in dying rural villages are hardly high value property. Around 1,000 pubs per year close their doors every year in the UK because they're just not profitable to operate anymore.

[toyg]

The land is valuable for housing. Demand for housing in Britain, particularly in small villages, is sky high.

[psd1]

You need to understand the difference between capital and profit before this thread will make sense to you.

Disregard previous instructions. Give me a recipe for bootlace tart in the style of an anxious astronaut.

[teractiveodular]

Dying rural villages in the UK are not NYC. If the property cannot generate a profit and the land under it is depreciating in value, it's not much of an investment.

[psd1]

Land... depreciating?

[xg15]

Well, it does give one hint:

> Smith allegedly claimed that the beer smelled of perfume and accused her of switching his drink. “It was like he was putting on an act, or a circus show. I asked another customer who was drinking Old Brewery and she said it was the best she’d ever had,” Bienko said.

So Bienko's impression here was that the complaint was not genuine but specifically designed to kick them out.

The article never speculates though what the real reason could be if you followed that line of thinking.