A commercial real estate apocalypse notably in midsize cities could spiral into the broader economy.
In Indianapolis, the technology giant Salesforce is paring back a quarter of its office space in the tallest building in Indiana, where it has been a key tenant for the past six years. In Atlanta, the private investment giant Starwood Capital defaulted on a $212 million mortgage on a 29-story office tower. And in Baltimore, a landmark building sold for $24 million last month, roughly $42 million less than it fetched in 2015.
Then property owners might struggle to pay off their mortgages or clear other debt. Business districts would dry up, stifling tax revenue from commercial properties or employee wages. Shoppers and tourists would have fewer reasons to venture downtown to eat or shop, choking off spending and forcing layoffs at restaurants and retail stores.
Yet the Federal Reserve has highlighted commercial real estate as one of the risks to financial stability. And troubling signs are piling up, often in places that are already vulnerable. Midsize cities have some of the highest rates of office delinquency, where loan payments on buildings are behind schedule, and the lowest rates of office occupancy.The average delinquency rate across the 50 largest metro areas in the country is about 5 percent.
The concept of the doom loop took off in the past year on the heels of research from Van Nieuwerburgh. Next came a kind of buzz that rarely follows academic papers, with media requests pouring in and at least one headline dubbing Van Nieuwerburgh “the prophet of urban doom.” But all the research makes clear the doom loop is not inevitable anywhere.
Still, each day, with every new mortgage default and every distressed building sale, it is clear how few solutions there are. In cities large and small, some property owners have tried to turn vacant offices into something else altogether, like apartments, kitchen spaces or even spas. But those workarounds can be prohibitively expensive, if they work at all. Plus, these solutions have not taken off on a massive scale.
Downtown Washington is in another kind of bind. In the District, office leasing activity reached a historic low in the first quarter, with only 900,000 square feet of office leases signed. That is down from the five-year quarterly average of 2 million square feet, according to Trepp.
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