Just an accounting issue for someone who owns it out right, but devastating for someone with a loan. I think this is why you’re seeing landlords offering multiple free months of rent nowadays. It allows them to adjust to actual market pricing annualized, while being able to call the “free” months an expense
And this mechanism was why; almost all the real estate was owned by funds and leveraged. Property values based on a multiplier of rent. They could weather a long spell of zero rental income because that effectively cost them nothing, but if the rent went down then the value went down and they had to come up with the difference.
Inefficient for society? Yes. But for the capital providers aka investment (and let's be clear: retirement) funds and banks? Definitely not.
The fundamental problem at the root of all of it is how the US does pensions. In contrast to most European countries that operate in a redistribution system, aka the current workers pay the pensions of the current pensioners in exchange for "IOU tokens", the US has everyone responsible for themselves... which leads to a constant influx of cash into all kinds of asset markets, no matter the market conditions.
And that is bad, for multiple reasons.
- it ties general economic downturns to people's pensions. That in turn factually prevents politics from doing what is right (e.g. restrict climate gas emissions), because a lot of companies make a lot of money by abusing the environment and cracking down on that would lead to them losing value.
- it creates a lot of perverse incentives. When you got almost 50 trillion dollars in total retirement funds [1] with hundreds of billions of dollars in new savings each year... that money has to go somewhere where it is backed by a physical asset or a consumption in the end. A lot of that money ends up in government bonds, which "allows" the US to cut taxes for the ultra-rich without limitations and balloon the national debt without consequences because guess what, the US can "always" borrow money. It's just as bad as Japan, only less openly exposed. What does not end up in bonds ends up primarily on the real estate market, driving the nonsense we're discussing here, and what remains goes into crap like Yo [2].
- it disincentivizes the forces of the free market from holding bad actors accountable. Under "normal" conditions, the AI bubble or Tesla would simply have run out of cash years ago because no one would give them more money, but when the scam is so large it ends up in the S&P 500, cash will flow in automatically from all the dumb money that is going into ETFs and other pension investment vehicles. Once you are in, you stay in.
- To make it worse, people are increasingly going from "moderate" managed funds to the extremes: either purely tracking funds that have virtually no fees deducting profits (and, in exchange, do not exercise voting rights) or into high-yield "activist investor" funds that love to do exploitative shit like forcing companies to redistribute their liquidity reserves as dividends (robbing the company of resilience against economic downturns) or engage in LBOs, buy-and-break-apart schemes and the likes. These almost always offload the consequences of making money for investors onto society at large... like, for example, malls falling apart because anchor stores fell victim to the vultures. Toys'R'Us is one particularly nasty example.
> At a certain point, that smells like a scam with a real estate business attached to it.
The entire pension based economy in the US is the true scam - in the end, it's all IOUs just like our "pension points" in Europe. If there is no economy around due to demographic collapse or whatever, the IOUs become just as worthless.
Normally I wouldn't even care, but unfortunately, the US pension market is so large that a lot of dollars flow out elsewhere, including our healthcare system, and I'm sick and tired of American vultures buying up everything in Europe Just Because They Can.
The problem is the financialization of everything, and the insistence on ensuring high rates of return above all other goals. Which is highly related to the dynamics that you mentioned here, so we're agreeing.
But other countries don't do this because the government stops them. In this country, the financial sector is more powerful and can override democracy through a couple of obvious means that we've all seen.
The result is effectively the plundering of a previously strong economy for the benefit of a couple of people.
Ask yourself why General Motors is taking the many billions of dollars in cash that they generate from their business operations and literally sending it directly to Wall Street bankers through the form of stock buybacks rather than investing in the next generation of electric cars. It's an obvious mistake, and eventually the bill will come, but maybe not in the lifetimes of the people who profit from it. Certainly not before they have a chance to buy another summer home.
China doesn't do this. They keep savings rates high and returns low, which means the money goes into building factories and infrastructure and lots of other things that ultimately make the country much, much wealthier.
The Netherlands does not. [1] It is also considered one of the best-run pension systems in the world.
> the current workers pay the pensions of the current pensioners in exchange for "IOU tokens", the US has everyone responsible for themselves
US Social Security works in the manner you described - current workers pay for current pensioners. This doesn't work great as we already know.
Making assets instead of workers pay for pensions isn't a bad idea per se. It makes no sense to load workers down with taxes to pay for seniors. The math only works as long as the population of workers grows or if you tax workers more and more.
Workers' labor produces ever-increasing surpluses every year. Use those surpluses aka higher productivity to support seniors.
1. https://ec.europa.eu/finance/docs/policy/191216-insurers-pen...
Here in America, we're also sick and tired of vultures buying up everything just because they can.
The entire industrialized world has the exact same problems with commercial real estate and rents for small businesses and people.
The common denominator across continents and political systems and economic factors and social factors: all the ownership is in the hand of the olds. Whether directly or indirectly through any kind of bank-and-funds-and-government schemes that can be dreamed up.
Well, if the town is dying, the "value of that building" is effectively cut in half, or worse, anyway. Asking a lot for rent is not gonna magically make the building worth more - it will just keep it unrented.
Investment fund's commodity is value - the rest are just tools to optimize the value.
The key is home loans for normal families can’t be called - commercial loans can.
A simpler rule that mostly covers today's problems, and adds very little overhead after the loan is signed, is often considered good enough.
Sorry, I can't understand why. Could you please expand a bit?
I don't get how decreasing the value of the building makes the loan more difficult to repay.
This means if I go bankrupt then the bank can sell the building and get its money back.
If the value of the building halves because the rent halved then I have a 6 million loan on a 5 million building. My LTV is 120%. The bank cannot get its money back by selling the building.
No bank is going to give me a loan on a property with an LTV of 120% so I’m stuck with my current bank. My current bank then increases my interest rate because I am now a very high risk customer who can’t leave. This is very expensive for me.
One way out of this situation is to get my LTV back to 60% which means I need to reduce the loan to 3 million by finding 3 million to pay off part of the loan.
Another way out is to sell the building for 5 million then pay the bank one million, exiting the deal with a loss of 1 million.
None of these are good for me. I’ll do anything to keep the value of the building high by charging high rents even if no one can actually pay the rents and the building sits empty.
Long term I might be able to exit by getting permission to convert it to flats.
Like, if a rent hike pushes out the tenant who has been there the longest, who has the most consistent revenue stream, in other words is the surest bet, then that, all by its lonesome, should be a pretty clear risk indicator to the bank.
If local people want shops on their high street then the only real solution is incredibly agressive fines for vacant commercial spaces.
Basically you have to pay a lot more if the building value goes down
Don't forget this is typically a short term things. When the economy improves the building will be rented again. So they need the books to look good today to get through.
If the lender insists the property be valued based on actual collections rather than hypothetical collections based on the rate once discounts expire or the asking rate if vacant, then they will have a loan where the borrower is underwater and that's going to end up as a loss on the bank's books.
If the borrower values it factually, they will be underwater and likely have to sell for a loss or be forclosed on.
There's also portfolio effects. If rent drops are acknowledged in one space, nearby spaces may also acknowledge lowered rents and most banks have lots of loans and many borrowers manage several buildings.
