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Comment by stevenae | Hacker News Reader

An intuition I am open to being incorrect: I found NEMA ostentatious and overpriced even at the peak of Uber/Twitter hype (the offices of which form a NEMA sandwich). Second only to the condo building that tilted because its piles were driven too shallow, it does not surprise me that this building would "lose value" in a correction.

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Correct. NEMA was always kind of ill-conceived.

Current vacancy rate is still less than 10%, so unsure what makes it ill-conceived. There is/was a lack of amenity-rich rentals targeted to young professional types in SF like you’d see in NYC and it fills a certain niche.

Main issue is rental market in SF is still soft so they can’t charge what they did pre-pandemic, and the location doesn’t help.

"so unsure what makes it ill-conceived"

The headline of the article is that it has lost 50% of it's value. During that same multi year period we have had well over 10% inflation.

So Maybe that part. Yeah I'm gonna go with that part.

Or maybe the investors just hate money and were going for -60% ROI. Who knows.

This is a really uncalled for response. The original comment pointed to the ostentatiousness of a luxury rental building, as if there is no place for it in SF.

It lost value because of a global pandemic years after it launched that has caused rents to fall, but has still managed to keep vacancy rates below 10%. Obviously it could not have planned for something completely outside of its control.

Real estate values aren't included in inflation calculations.

This is wrong. Housing accounts for about a third of CPI. There's some funkiness about how the Owners Equivalent of Rent is calculated but real estate prices definitely show up in inflation.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-does-the-consumer-pri...

Nope. Owner's equivalent rent is not the same as real estate price.

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