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Crip Dyke's avatar

>> "The real estate market is already a disaster, with office buildings worth a fraction of what they were once worth" <<

Yeah, this is known as "supply and demand" and when the internet allows people to work from home so 20%-60% of your desks are open every day (depending on the type of business you run), it actually occurs to the shareholder types that they could save 20% to 60% of their real estate costs in exchange for very modest increases in IT -- much of it in communications security which many companies should have been investing more in already, so it's almost cost free.

But when their leases are up and they say, "Sure, I only want to lease 4 floors not 5," the building owners can't find anyone to rent that 5th floor because literally all their other tenants are also looking to rent less, not more.

And so entire floors go unoccupied and landlords offer cheaper rents since "cheap" still gets them more money than "zero". And if the rents fall, then by definition your building's theoretical ability to generate income falls, and if that falls, then the building, like any business asset, will be valued less.

All of this was inevitable with the rise of the internet and videoconferencing technologies which were pioneered first by academics to see what was possible on the bleeding edge of tech, for research purposes, and then by the pornographers, because if 900 numbers worked so well, what about 900 numbers WITH LIVE VIDEO?, and then for the tech nerd video gamers, who wanted to do it, but not so much that they wanted to pay for it.

And that's how you get low cost tech. But the business community wasn't going to embrace it unless and until they had to, because the people at the top of business are old and conservative.

ENTER TRUMP.

Because he couldn't manage the COVID crisis of 2020 (and regretfully to be fair, it's not clear that anyone could have, but you gotta admit he was particularly bad at it), we all had to dramatically limit face to face interactions and suddenly many industries found that the nature of their work allowed an alternative to shut down: OnlyFans. Wait, excuse me, "Zoom," which is OnlyFans without the pay-per-minute option. Sure restaurant workers never got a telecommute option, and sure as hell hospitals' medical staff didn't, but just about anyone who plays with numbers, writes reports, or codes computers did. And that's how we got where we are.

Why did I write out this long thingamabob, you ask? It is because Trump is complaining about real estate values falling in NYC after he specifically told the people under him he wanted COVID to run rampant to punish the people he didn't like in NY and Cali and all those other dense urban areas that tend to vote blue.

It boils down to this: Trump is complaining in court filings that Trump crashed his property values on purpose to own the libs and guess what? Now the libs are gonna own everything he thought was his.

SAD.

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Martini Glambassador's avatar

NOBODY WANTS TO BUSINESS IN NEW YORK ANYMORE! Well, except for all of the companies that want to do business in New York, one of the priciest real estate markets in the world, for some reason, which might have to do with supply and demand, I dunno, I’m no “billionaire” real estate mogul.

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