The Ghost in America’s Offices

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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The Ghost in America’s Offices

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Business landlords have decided their tenants are not coming back. Some have started to leave the buildings where they rent to these tenants completely. These renters have given up on the idea that companies renting from them will never return. Companies that own these tenantless buildings have started to hand them over to mortgage holders, which have no use for them at all. (Click here to see why small education businesses are struggling the most to pay rent.)
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Cities have a growing number of commercial buildings that could be called ghost buildings. Like blighted areas in residential sections of cities, no one shows up, ever. There was some idea that empty office buildings could be turned into residential buildings. In most cases, this is expensive, and there is no guarantee that people who want apartments will come.
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The bad situation is permanent. Parts of America’s downtowns and business centers cannot rebound.

There is nothing like the current state of empty buildings. This problem did not exist at this scale during the Great Recession.
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Work-from-home lifestyles have become so popular that companies have had to fight to get people back. The most recent example of this is Amazon. Management said it expected workers to return. The decision caused a revolt. Amazon has to decide if it wants to lose some of these people, likely including some valuable employees, or stick to its new rules and let these people go. Hundreds of companies face the same dilemma.
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The American office building has changed forever. So have the financials of people who have owned them.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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