If after 350 years they couldn't manage to turn enough profit to buy real estate then I guess they had it coming
They own plenty of real estate:
* https://www.retail-insider.com/retail-insider/2020/10/hudson...
It's just that a lot of retail is now done at malls, and so they have to rent from the mall's owner as there are fewer and fewer 'stand-alone' locations that shoppers would be willing to make a separate trip to, especially in more suburban areas.
There are pros and cons to each approach:
> The big valuation gap is due to disagreements over how much of Hudson’s Bay’s prime real estate can be divested while keeping it operational. Selling off property raises cash but also makes it more financially burdensome for the company to rent the space for the stores it operates. As a result, it would likely close stores, and its retail footprint would begin to shrink.
[…]
> Sale lease-back arrangements in which retailers sell their properties and become tenants have become increasingly popular in the past few years as the downturn in brick-and-mortar retail brought about by the rise of internet shopping has put pressure on retailers to raise cash.
> However, some retailers resist them because they view the rent obligation as burdensome, a stance that often attracts investor criticism. Another department store operator, Macy’s Inc., for example, was pressured by hedge fund Starboard Value LP three years ago to do more to cash out on its real estate.
* https://financialpost.com/news/retail-marketing/hudsons-bay-...
The largest single real estate transaction that I am aware of was the purchase of Prince Rupert's land by Canada from the Hudson's Bay Company in 1870. For comparison, it was roughly twice the size of the Louisiana Purchase.
(It was actually not exactly a sale, but close enough. Canada paid Hudson's Bay to surrender its charter to England, that then assigned the land, free of said charter, to Canada.)
Pension plans will pay more money for real estate in a REIT than a Corp because pension plans don’t pay taxes, and REITs don’t either (when the recipient is a pension).
Sometimes the “sale” is a separate fund and they simply give each shareholder a REIT unit for every share they have.
Big corps with high family ownerships like these anyway because it helps isolate the RE from getting dragged down by the retail division. And it provides this diversification via tax-deferred spin-off.
Shareholders are not interested in 100 square feet of dirt. They're interested in a slice of the revenue generated by seeking rent on the dirt someone else is using.
My personal retort to that would be some long-winded complaint about how America's cities deliberately mismanage land to inflate it's value, but radical political explanations don't make businesses profitable. If the land is going to be ridiculously expensive, you might as well try to make something off of it, eh?
That doesn't excuse the fact that most restauraunt REITs are nearly-transparent scams for well-connected shareholders to siphon off land from valuable businesses, though.