If landlords can’t pay back loans on office buildings, the lenders will suffer. Some banks are trying to avoid that fate.
Hard times are likely ahead for a lot of people. Mind your expenses and plan to save where possible just in case. Apologies for having a doomer outlook; I’m very cynical about capitalism, especially in the USA.
What’s hilarious is some of the crisis- at least in the commercial real estate space- was created by the banks.
when you take out a loan for commercial real estate- like office buildings and such like- it’s somewhat abnormal for the building to be monolithic in tenancy- most spaces are a leased out like apartments. The glaring exceptions to this are mega-corporate HQ’s like Amazon’s or Google’s or Apple’s.
The value of the property is then usually described by minimum lease per square foot. The owners/property management are then locked into keeping rates above that minimum by the lender as terms on the loans. When there was a comercial real estate boom in the late teens to early 2020’s… the value of commercial real estate skyrocketed… and so did this minimum.
when covid hit, the values plummeted and continue to fall. Demand has changed and fallen with remote work… and the rates are too high because all the corporate places dumped their offices and now the people wanting offices are more the start ups or professional types that don’t need massive amounts of space, and don’t want to or can’t spend 30-50/sqrft/month.
the landlords are going to go tits up because everybody always assumed property value would go up.
*Part of the change in how we use office spaces is now being more “social”- with office buildings adding in features you might expect to see in apartments; things like gyms, seating/booths/meeting spaces in lobbies, tenant lounges; rooftop patios, which also chews into the amount of revenue because that all takes up space.
Tough situation for banks and people working inside them. For those clamoring that it is 2008 all over again, it is, because the way markets and companies work has not changed (and a bank is just another type of company).
Suppose you are a chief risk officer of one of those banks before Covid hit. You have been hired by the CEO so you need to play with the CEO to advance his/her agenda. Other banks are lending more and more to commercial real estate developers as there is demand and they are paying their loans on time. Your own bank’s board of directors and CEO are putting pressure to join the market and lend more to those property developers otherwise you own bank’s profit will look lower than the competition. You know that, by doing so, the concentration of loans in that sector will become quite high but, if you keep resisting, the CEO and/or the board will find someone more amenable who doesn’t seem to panic when every other bank is making money. Then you cave in. You decide to approve more business going to those loans although you caveat that this might exceed risk appetite and gets the board and CEO to formally approve it as well.
Now the bank is proudly going with the flow and investors are not complaining anymore.
the CRO isn’t there to stop risk, in the same way that HR/ethics-and-compliance people aren’t there to protect people.
Why are you paraphrasing the article like this is your own personal analysis?
