Which 'Cheap' Fancy Tower Will YOU Buy?

People are selling off those luxury office buildings, baby!

Photo of all the buildings we are buying by Karl Köhler on Unsplash

Name something tall, empty, and decaying into utter shambles. Not Donald Trump, silly, it’s a commercial real estate tower in any given city near you! But much like the aforementioned necrotic tangerine-hued anal polyp, these things are for sale to the highest bidder. Matthew Goldstein has the rundown on commercial real estate fire sales, over in ye ole New York Times:

Several big office buildings nationwide — including in Manhattan — have recently sold at steep discounts of as much as 70 percent to opportunistic buyers, who are gambling that they will score big profits when prices eventually rebound.

In April, a little-known firm, Yellowstone Real Estate Investments, paid $185 million for 1740 Broadway, a storied office tower near Columbus Circle in Manhattan. The investment giant Blackstone had paid $600 million for the building a decade earlier. And this week, two real estate firms snapped up a Midtown Manhattan tower for less than $50 million, according to Bloomberg.

Lest we get too excited about our future 115-story homes, this does not exactly bode well for the economy at large. While we may all get a strong sexual charge from the sight of thousands of dented office chairs for sale in the front yard of an abandoned corporate HQ (imagine how you’ll decorate your rumpus room!) it is still Not Great.

Distressed deal-making is one of the more visible illustrations of trouble brewing in the sector that could lead to large losses for hundreds of banks and investors in real-estate-backed loans.

Now, why is this happening? Oh, you know, the enduring glory of pandemic work-from-home life, and also the rent is too damn high. Building owners can’t keep tenants, so they can’t pay their mortgages. Investors are thrilled to snap up the buildings at cut-rate prices.

Some of these investors are betting they’ll find a way to make major buckaroos eventually, perhaps by converting this empty real estate to apartments. Cities are fun and sexy places to be sometimes, so why not make a Don Draper Valhallas into a stack of overpriced dwelling-boxes?

Many in the real estate business see converting office buildings into apartments as a way to deal with the need for more housing in cities and the decreased demand for office space. But conversions are costly, and not all buildings are easy to retrofit.

Can we count on cities around the country successfully partnering with private companies to create robust profit for investors and affordable housing solutions for low- and middle-income families? HAHAHA NO ABSOLUTELY NOT, at least not on a grand scale. It’s possible, and Lord knows it would be a magnificent expansion of our worn-out, old, fragile social safety net. There are excellent planners with great ideas for how to do it. But given the incessant appetite for profit, I am cynical about more than a few such experiments coming to pass in a meaningful way. (Please feel free to share any local anecdotes from your area that might give Crusty Old Auntie Sara some hope.)

The vital question remains: Which office building will YOU buy with your many millions of dollars, and what will you do with it? I have selected a few buildings that are not for sale (YET!) and invite you to choose one and explain (in the comments) what you will do with it.

The Empire State Building under construction in 1930, via Wikipedia

The Empire State Building

Hey, investors bought New York’s iconic Flatiron Building and intend to flip some of it to apartments. Can Ye Ole ESB be far behind? She’s tall, she’s gorgeous, she’s been in so many movies she surely has a SAG-AFTRA card, and she has a great online social presence. She’s witty! You can rent her out for birthday parties, film shoots, and orgies. Imagine the AirBnb or VRBO potential! It would be like staying in Cinderella’s Castle at Disney, but with even more gay mice to sew dresses for you for your little balls with princes. This is your best pied-à-terre idea ever.

Chicago’s Sears Tower in 1978, via Wikipedia

The Willis Tower (FKA The Sears Tower)

This little apple blossom is 110 stories and 1,451 feet high. From 1973 to 1998, it was the world’s tallest building. But then other cities went through puberty and built stuff way up into the sky, so now this Chicago debutante is but a petite, shy flower compared to the CN Tower in Toronto and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. You could marry this building and drape a giant veil over it. You could invent your own university and give out bogus degrees for things like HVAC Dominance and Slash Fiction Prowess. You could make it the world’s biggest McDonald’s, where the whole thing is just one McDonald’s franchise, but one of the cool ones like how in Biltmore Village, NC, they’ve got a very nice piano next to where you eat your fries. Now I want McDonald’s.

The Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, via Wikipedia

The Transamerica Pyramid

Also not yet on Zillow, the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco is a great place to stash all your Ghirardelli chocolate and tech stocks. You should definitely put in a bid for a casual $150 million and turn it into a very tall nonprofit leather dungeon with scholarships available to all leather daddies. Happy Pride!

Please enjoy your rock ‘n’ roll real estate fantasies, and do consider a paid subscription or one-time gift to Wonkette so that we can hire somebody’s grandma to sponge paint every bathroom in the luxury office building we will buy tomorrow. You will be invited to the grand opening, which will involve beer and cheese balls.