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Comment by ammut | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious to see what will happen with the bagholders of office real estate. Will they try to reinvent themselves as mixed use residential/commercial? Or is it possible we will see a wave of defaults as vacancy rates continue to climb?

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I've noticed how many fluff-filled articles I see lately about 'needing to get back to the office' in many publications that seem to have a large number of advertisers selling office space. I don't have any numbers, but it seems pretty crazy how many of these have been popping up in different 'business journal' types of sites.

It's not crazy at all. Our entire society is built around exploitatively extracting maximum value from each other and that often requires creative marketing to invent want where none existed before.

Office to residential conversions are pretty tough. I don't think we'll see a ton of them.

I don't think there is a fundamental reason for that. Office buildings are designed to be reconfigured. I guess you'd need to rip out + replace the plumbing + HVAC (or only put in a few ultra-luxury units per floor).

Office buildings tend to have all their plumbing centrally located. Converting to residential means spreading it all around. It's not like just moving partitions around.

Sprinkler systems tend to be evenly distributed around floors so the conduits etc. to run additional piping are already in place. Not every building has such systems but most constructed after 1980 do.

The sewer pipes and vents have to be run everywhere, and they have specific requirements. Sewer pipes, for example, half to have a slope. The vent pipes have to go up. There may be floor loading problems. There's going to need to be a lot more electrical wiring.

It's not impossible, it's just expensive.

There's going to be a massive PR campaign to get employees back into the office. Story after story about how going back to the office increased productivity etc etc. They're going to give businesses the hard sell to lease office space again and get their employees back into the office.

Not everyone will go along with this, but if they could get 80% of the people back it'll probably be enough to prevent commercial real estate from collapsing.

Do we know how much of commercial real estate is owned by foreign entities? ie. Chinese elites laundering money out of China into the West? I wonder if they have any protections to save their investments or is their money made from value generated in China just literally disappearing?

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