Yes, and that's what you'd expect in an Econ 101, "land is just like any other commodity" situation. The problems with this are several: - The value of a comm

Yes, and that's what you'd expect in an Econ 101, "land is just like any other commodity" situation. The problems with this are several: - The value of a commercial building is a function of rentable value times expected ownership period. If you own a machine that prints $40k/mo for 10 years, then it's value is $4.8m. - Most landlords do not buy the land outright but instead buy everything with mortgages. This is true for both commercial and residential real estate. And everyone is leveraged to the hilt. - The reduction in commercial office rentals has caused a reduction in the actual value of the real estate in question[0]. Since landlords are leveraged, they can't sell without going underwater. The entire real estate market has an interest in keeping land prices high - it's a sort of class collusion. So there's a lot of systems in place to deny the inevitable, kick the can down the road, and so on. For example, banks will actually agree to repayment pauses when a building is between tenants, because it beats having a landlord liquidate a bunch of underwater properties and actually realize losses on something that is literally government-engineered to stay expensive. [0] There's an interesting wrinkle to this in that normally you actually wouldn't be allowed to do this. When you buy a building to rent it you also agree to a price floor set by the bank. If you rent for less your mortgage explodes - as in, you immediately have to recollateralize (pay back) the building value that you destroyed by undervaluing your rent.