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Economy
Moody's Predicts 24% Of Office Towers Will Be Vacant By 2026
2024-06-29
[ZeroHedge] A new report from Moody's offers yet another grim outlook that the commercial real estate downturn is nowhere near the bottom. Elevated interest rates and persistent remote and hybrid working trends could result in around 24% of all office towers standing vacant within the next two years. The office tower apocalypse will result in more depressed values that will only pressure landlords.
What about the return-to-the-office trend? Many companies are doing that, too.
"Combining these insights, with our more than 40 years of historic office performance data, as well as future employment projections, our model indicates that the impact on office demand from work from home will be around 14% on average across a 63- month period, resulting in vacancy rates that peak in early 2026 at approximately 24% nationally," Moody's analysts Todd Metcalfe, Anthony Spinelli, and Thomas LaSalvia wrote in the report.

In a separate report, Tom LaSalvia, Moody's head of CRE economics, wrote that the office vacancy rate's move from 19.8% in the first quarter of this year to the expected 24% by 2026 could reduce revenue for office landlords by between $8 billion and $10 billion. Factor in lower rents and higher costs, this may translate into "property value destruction" in the range of a quarter-trillion dollars.

In addition to remote working trends, Moody's analysts pointed out that the amount of office space per worker has been in a "general downward trend for decades."

At the peak of the Dot-Com boom, office workers used an average of 190 sq ft. The figure has since slid to 155 sq ft in 2023.
Posted by:Skidmark

#9  Issac Asimov said it all a long time ago.

Look up Trantor in his foundation series.
What it could be and all the horrors of authoritarianism to boot.
Posted by: alanc   2024-06-29 15:29  

#8  I remember splashes of a story like that.

Everyone was wasted away from EV travel inside the buildings. Longer treks took the electric wheelchairs in horizontal escalators between buildings, like Musk's tunnels.

A rebel group masked themselves in blankets to reduce their muscle signature. Their goal was to damage the HVAC and elevators, forcing everyone outside.

It worked. Then everyone developed skin cancer and cornea burns as the sun had also evolved.
Posted by: Skidmark   2024-06-29 13:46  

#7  Sometimes is people with stupid money who least understand the limits of money.
Posted by: M. Murcek   2024-06-29 13:41  

#6  ^4, Deacon, not unlike Niven & Pournelle's Oath of Fealty.
Posted by: ed in texas   2024-06-29 13:39  

#5  Saudi Arabia Breaks Ground on Massive Sci-Fi Megacity

Why Mohammed bin Salman has been forced to rein in his dreams of a mirror city

Posted by: Skidmark   2024-06-29 13:38  

#4  The World Inside is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert Silverberg, published in 1971. The novel originally appeared as a series of shorter works in 1970 and 1971, all but one published in Galaxy, including the Hugo nominated novella "The World Outside". The World Inside was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1972, although Silverberg declined the nomination.
On March 2, 2010, Orb Books published this title as a trade paperback edition.
The novel is set on Earth in the year 2381, when the population of the planet has reached 75 billion people.[4] Population growth has skyrocketed due to a quasi-religious belief in human reproduction as the highest possible good. Most of the action occurs in a massive three-kilometer-high city tower called Urban Monad 116.
War, starvation, crime and birth control have been eliminated. Life is now totally fulfilled and sustained within Urban Monads (Urbmons), mammoth thousand-floor skyscrapers arranged in "constellations", where the shadow of one building does not fall upon another. An Urbmon is divided into 25 self-contained "cities" of 40 floors each, in ascending order of status, with administrators occupying the highest level. Each building can hold approximately 800,000 people, with excess population totalling three billion a year transferred to new Urbmons, which are continually under construction.

The Urbmon population is supported by the conversion of all of the Earth's habitable land area not taken up by Urbmons to agriculture. The theoretical limit of the population supported by this arrangement is estimated to be 200 billion. The farmers live a very different lifestyle, with strict birth control. Farmers trade their produce for technology and the two societies rarely have direct contact; even their languages are mutually unintelligible.
A very interesting book. I did my architecture thesis proposal based on it.
Posted by: Deacon+Blues   2024-06-29 12:03  

#3  Having a dedicated workspace with no personal distractions, and with definitive posted hours of availability and most efficient form of communication being face to face is ideal, I can see how trying not to get killed while walking through shit and needles can be motivating.

So fewer renters, and New York has decided that the government can just determine a buildings new property value and sue the owners for the difference, every tin pot DA can copy paste that process.
Posted by: swksvolFF   2024-06-29 11:03  

#2  Each kid gets his own cubicle.
Posted by: Super Hose   2024-06-29 08:58  

#1  Dense housing...

Moody's expects vacancy rates to top out as office towers are demolished or converted to residential ones in the coming years.
Posted by: Skidmark   2024-06-29 04:49  

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