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Seattle here, and a real estate nerd. This is almost entirely an artifact of the financial instruments used to pay for these buildings, regardless of any Seatt

Seattle here, and a real estate nerd. This is almost entirely an artifact of the financial instruments used to pay for these buildings, regardless of any Seattle policy changes. The Seattle Times has always been a conservative rag, and their editorial board hates the new mayor, so they hit the "Seattle is dying" story as often as possible. They've got a long history of this whenever there's leadership they don't like, ask me about it! In Bellevue, office vacancies are low because most have long term tenants - even if the spaces aren't full of workers, the companies paying for them can continue to do so. In Seattle, most office space is leased by smaller companies. We have diversity in availability, which is great, we have tiny office leases available as well as big ones. I believe those smaller spaces also often had shorter leases. There are some spaces in Seattle where an anchor tenant (Indeed with 11 floors in the 2+U building at 1201 2nd Ave is a good example) shrank the footprint they use, and quickly sublet floors they aren't using. Those sublets can be priced appropriately for the market, and the main tenant keeps paying the original lease price. However, when a space loses a tenant, the bank can't just drop the price for the owner, the same as you can't just pay less on your mortgage if you get a lower paying job. That has to go through a long, painful process, and usually the building will end up sold before pricing can change. This is lag. It's easy to correlate it with a choice by Amazon or with new taxes, but there's quite a bit of demand for office space in Seattle, just not at the prices the owners are forced to ask with their financing instruments. We just saw another building turn over, US Bank Center. The new owner bought it at a price where they'll be able to lease it competitively, and it won't sit empty. We'll see that continue to happen.

lokar 3mo ago
And you have to wonder, what kind of boom in innovation could lots of reasonably priced office space support? What gov policy cold push landlords and banks to accept reality? Vacancy tax? Change to bank regulations?
- pfannkuchen 3mo ago
  Make usury illegal again? (I mean the classical definition not the watered down modern one)
- Schiendelman 3mo ago
  The timeframe of regulatory changes here is not worth any investment. The turnover will continue to happen, it's too complicated to try to change, and you'd probably create nasty unexpected side effects.
  - lokar 3mo ago
    Some could be fairly simple. Require banks to re-calculate collateral values after 6mo of vacancy, with a large requirement to reduce.
    - Schiendelman 3mo ago
      Can you think of two potential downstream effects that could have that you wouldn't want?
hyperrail 3mo ago
> This is almost entirely an artifact of the financial instruments used to pay for these buildings, regardless of any Seattle policy changes. Why would this be different in Seattle than in other cities? Many downtown office towers are bought or built using a lot of debt throughout the U.S. What do you think makes Seattle special? > We just saw another building turn over, US Bank Center. The new owner bought it at a price where they'll be able to lease it competitively, and it won't sit empty. We'll see that continue to happen. The news story mentions the U.S. Bank Center example. What it says that you're leaving out is just HOW big that discount is: > The new owner of the U.S. Bank Center, having paid just $280 million, or less than half of what the building went for in 2019, presumably can afford to lower rents enough to fill the place, which is now 45% vacant, according to CoStar. A discount of more than 50% is a bubble bursting. It's great that the new owner can offer fire-sale rent, but where does that leave the old owner, if they were truly as leveraged as you suggest they were likely to be? > The Seattle Times has always been a conservative rag, and their editorial board hates the new mayor, so they hit the "Seattle is dying" story as often as possible. They've got a long history of this whenever there's leadership they don't like, ask me about it! OK, I'll ask you about it. This "Seattle Times = Blethen family propaganda" line has been tiring for the 25 years I've been hearing it. What exactly are they not covering about Seattle's downtown today that you think they should be? Why do you think that their opinion staff influence the news coverage so much? In short, if the Seattle Times has a conservative bias in its news coverage, why does the Wall Street Journal famously have a liberal-biased newsroom?
- Schiendelman 3mo ago
  Why is Seattle impacted worse? Because so much of our office space was tech companies that decided they didn't need as much office space and can do their work remotely. Look up the old owner and you'll realize why it doesn't really matter that they're taking a massive loss, and why I don't really care. I left it out because it's already a long comment and that's not really relevant. They could have written an article about how foreclosures on office buildings take a long time and that sublet offerings in Seattle are turning over at a healthy rate. And the owner of a company in media absolutely influences that coverage, why do you think everybody's worried about CBS, or for a long time Fox News?
nighthawk454 3mo ago
This tracks with what I’ve heard around as well. What changed in the financial instruments? My understanding is a lot of the loans have gone PIK or otherwise essentially aren’t serviceable at current prices. Do you think that’s resolvable somehow or just lagging implosion?
- Schiendelman 3mo ago
  Nothing changed in financial instruments - we just don't usually have a lot of office tenants decide to walk away like we have with the advent of remote work. The loans will work themselves out. We've seen a couple of buildings trade for way less than pre-Covid numbers, and we'll see more. In another 10 years downtown Seattle will be aligned with the rest of the market again.
jmyeet 3mo ago
I'm not sure the bank has that much to do with it. Commercial real estate valuation is based entirely on its ability to produce income. Lower the rent, lower the value. And that's a problem because most commercial leases are long (5-20+ years) so you're locking in an asset writedown for a long period of time. So it can be better to leave it vacant and pretend the value hasn't changed. You can still run into problems with this (eg servicing the loan). So I don't think it's quite the issue that banks have to approve lowering the rent so much as the owner might lower their asset value and have problems with the LTV and DSCR so the bank may then require you to refinance or add capital. By the way, we've gone through this before. Up until the 1990s, law firms were by far the largest tenants of office space because they had very large law libraries. Then that went online and they downsized. This was an acpolaypse in the 2000s combined with the dot-com bust. I think the lag you're talking about is on banks essentially foreclosing on a building and selling it off, allowing the new owners to charge less because they paid less.
- Schiendelman 3mo ago
  Yes, that's exactly the lag I'm talking about. The banks won't allow the buildings to lease for less than they need to make per sqft to pay back their loans. They'd rather foreclose, apparently. There's some reporting around this recently, I'm not in a position to look it up today but it should be easy to find!
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - awakeasleep 3mo ago
    [dead]
xnx 3mo ago
Is there any more to this story than "extend and pretend" that's been going on for 6 years?
- Schiendelman 3mo ago
  Tell me more? As commercial leases are ending the owners are finally having to accept foreclosure or sell.
- randsorex 3mo ago
  CRE also includes warehouses, multifamily apartments, retail, hotels, data centers, medical. I think we kind of lucked out that we had the start of boom in 2023 instead of a recession. The diversification has allowed the office space price to correct without a contagion. As a general rule, any snappy memorable line like "extend and pretend" is almost always wrong and a distortion after awhile. The idea sticks around longer than it should because it is memorable, not because it has anything to do with reality.
dlcarrier 3mo ago
In Bellevue, office vacancies are low because most have long term tenants… Well yeah, Bellevue isn't trying to drive all of the office tenants out of their city.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- halestock 3mo ago
  I'll bite, how's Seattle doing that?
  - thorncorona 3mo ago
    Crime. Everyone moves from DT Seattle to the eastside when they start a family. It’s normalized at this point, where if you see a potential threat u just walk across the street and go on with your business. Hostile business environment. Jumpstart, inflationary wage environment, etc. Living in DT Seattle is just meh. Expensive and the food scene is terrible due to local labor policies. Inability to get anything done from the local govt. Wilson spent her campaign promising to make it easier to build housing and just gave in to nimby interests again. Local politics is lunacy. Constant issues with the the unhoused population but it’s ok let’s just keep pushing it to little Saigon / Chinatown! Close your eyes since it doesn’t happen if you’re in Wallingford, QA, or Ballard! Fewer and fewer major cos investing into the area. And then there’s 0 transit enforcement or even any attempt at it. We don’t even have fare gates on the link for gods sake. It’s just completely absurd how mismanaged this city is, despite how much potential there is. Nowadays more and more offices opening in Bellevue.
  - murderfs 3mo ago
    They passed a tax on basically just Amazon in 2018 and there were rumblings of Amazon leaving the city for Bellevue/Redmond. The city council repealed it within a month and things quieted down, but then COVID happened, they passed basically the same tax again, and this time it stuck. Since then, Amazon's been slowly leaving Seattle for the eastside by moving employees as their building leases expire: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-no-longer-seattles-no-1-employer-as-head-count-dips-below-50k/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-no-longe...
naturalmovement 3mo ago
> The Seattle Times has always been a conservative rag The Seattle Times is Left-Center with a high credibility rating. [1] Such a deliberate distortion of the facts renders the rest of your screed null and void. [1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/seattle-times/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/seattle-times/
- lukeschlather 3mo ago
  They're looking at national politics, and on that score, yes, the ST is liberal. When it comes to local politics the Seattle Times is conservative. Your objection is a bit like people who object that the Democrats are conservatives, from a European perspective, except this is about the city itself. The current mayor is liberal, the previous mayor was conservative. They're both Democrats and would be defined as liberals by your factcheck, but that's a different rubric than the one we're talking about.
  - siren2026 3mo ago
    As a European, Democrats are absolutely not conservative from a European perspective. There are multiple dimensions but at least socially they push everything further to the left than in Europe. (Which is also in my opinion why they are losing elections) Almost every social topic is pushed to the extreme left by the Democrats. Simply look at how many weeks abortion is allowed in blue state and compare with most European countries. Most European countries are way more conservative. Economically yes, they are more conservative but even that is now changing as well (see: New York and AOC).
    - brookst 3mo ago
      How do Democrats’ policies on health care, paid leave from work, unions, public funding of political campaigns, and public transit compare to European conservatives? If you’re a single-issue abortion voter, yes the US democrats tend to propose fetal viability (22 weeks or so) as the limit, while most of Europe is 12 weeks. UK and Netherlands are 24. But if you genuinely believe US democrats are wildly liberal, you must be that rare European Fox News watcher.
IG_Semmelweiss 3mo ago
What are the financial "instruments" ? The main claims from the article seem worrysome, IN particular, the 37% vacancy rate, as well as multiple buildings underwater[3], etc. Now, lets dissect the claims that this is part of some cycle, and not the result of new city hall management. The reality is that with Jumpstart, and with the vacancy rate, enterprises are not renting. But, the owner is stuck with the asset in what is now a hostile jurisdiction. So, even if owner may not be able to change terms on their mortgage, they certainly can charge less for rent. Empty units do not contribute to cash flows to pay the building mortage. I understand there may be consequences to lowering rents, but those consequences are coming home anyway: The building will need to be sold, at a loss, by the bank to a new owner. And as you said, that process takes time. And the jurisdiction seems hellbent to make it harder. Now, as buildings sell, this in turn lowers the appraised value, which is key to the Seattle tax base. So, the downtown core is going to produce far less in property taxes in the foreseeable future, with fewer tenants paying (at least in short term) occupancy taxes, etc. This is going to play out in a decade. According to this, commercial property taxes are about 26 %[1] of the Seattle budget Let's assume appraisals go down 50% for those impaired offices. This is not crazy, there's precendent for it[2]. That means the Seattle budget must be cut by 13%. This is not even factoring other losses from job loss, sales tax lost, etc. Maybe that's not "Seattle is dying" , but sound pretty bad ? [1] https://www.seattle.gov/documents/departments/financedepartment/19proposedbudget/revenueoverview.pdf https://www.seattle.gov/documents/departments/financedepartm... [2] Seattle/downtown office properties lost ~$10–15+ billion in assessed value since 2020 (46–48% drop) . https://cdn.downtownseattle.org/app/uploads/2026/06/New-Report-JumpStart-Promised-Growth.-Seattle-Got-an-Economic-Slowdown-1.pdf https://cdn.downtownseattle.org/app/uploads/2026/06/New-Repo... [3] https://www.king5.com/article/money/business/downtown-seattle-association-business-climate-report/281-58f97cb0-b256-4444-a9b6-385dafe830ff https://www.king5.com/article/money/business/downtown-seattl...
- Schiendelman 3mo ago
  The financial instruments are commercial real estate loans. Those loans often do not allow the borrower to charge lower rent. Property taxes are not calculated that way. The property tax rate for a given year is backed into (a "mill rate") based on approved dollars of spending divided by total property value. If total citywide property value drops by 50%, the property tax rate doubles that year. So no, the property value changes aren't really an issue.
edg5000 3mo ago
Your argument is that it's simply because of dropping prices. Maybe that does explain the bulk of it. But the article seems to suggest it's the WFH transition. How much of the vacancy rate would be explained by that?
- brookst 3mo ago
  Is there any reason to think WFH rates would differ between Seattle and Bellevue? I’m not super knowledgeable in this area but GP is right the The Seattle Times is a very partisan outlet that spins confirmation bias into everything. Left-leaning politicians elected? The rain is their fault. Centrists (because this is Seattle)? They’re doing the best they can, maybe give more money to Amazon?
- carljungslabtek 3mo ago
  I can tell you specifically that Indeed dropped its footprint because of WFH. They moved into that building during covid, then shortly after introduced permanent work from home / hybrid. The other person’s point about rents probably explains the continued emptiness but WFH definitely drove the abandonment. And that newspaper does suck.
- Schiendelman 3mo ago
  "Explained by" is complicated - 100,000 square feet of empty space that is leased to a company and unused is not vacant.
expedition32 3mo ago
Cities don't die they just go into hibernation for a few decades only to wake up and grow stronger. The whole office real estate thing operates on a boom bust cycle.
carlosjobim 3mo ago
> However, when a space loses a tenant, the bank can't just drop the price for the owner, the same as you can't just pay less on your mortgage if you get a lower paying job. You can always pay less on your mortgage or any other debts if you are in a crisis and negotiate with the lenders. They prefer this immensely over not receiving anything at all. And in the long run they also receive more interest this way. It's very common especially for businesses to enter these kind of negotiations with the banks, and not very uncommon for individuals either. So it makes much better sense for everybody involved to sublet these spaces for market value, even if that income doesn't cover the original mortgage, because something is better than nothing. Somewhere there's a giant perverse incentive in situations like this.

lokar 3mo ago

And you have to wonder, what kind of boom in innovation could lots of reasonably priced office space support? What gov policy cold push landlords and banks to accept reality? Vacancy tax? Change to bank regulations?

pfannkuchen 3mo ago
Make usury illegal again? (I mean the classical definition not the watered down modern one)
Schiendelman 3mo ago
The timeframe of regulatory changes here is not worth any investment. The turnover will continue to happen, it's too complicated to try to change, and you'd probably create nasty unexpected side effects.
- lokar 3mo ago
  Some could be fairly simple. Require banks to re-calculate collateral values after 6mo of vacancy, with a large requirement to reduce.
  - Schiendelman 3mo ago
    Can you think of two potential downstream effects that could have that you wouldn't want?

hyperrail 3mo ago

> This is almost entirely an artifact of the financial instruments used to pay for these buildings, regardless of any Seattle policy changes. Why would this be different in Seattle than in other cities? Many downtown office towers are bought or built using a lot of debt throughout the U.S. What do you think makes Seattle special? > We just saw another building turn over, US Bank Center. The new owner bought it at a price where they'll be able to lease it competitively, and it won't sit empty. We'll see that continue to happen. The news story mentions the U.S. Bank Center example. What it says that you're leaving out is just HOW big that discount is: > The new owner of the U.S. Bank Center, having paid just $280 million, or less than half of what the building went for in 2019, presumably can afford to lower rents enough to fill the place, which is now 45% vacant, according to CoStar. A discount of more than 50% is a bubble bursting. It's great that the new owner can offer fire-sale rent, but where does that leave the old owner, if they were truly as leveraged as you suggest they were likely to be? > The Seattle Times has always been a conservative rag, and their editorial board hates the new mayor, so they hit the "Seattle is dying" story as often as possible. They've got a long history of this whenever there's leadership they don't like, ask me about it! OK, I'll ask you about it. This "Seattle Times = Blethen family propaganda" line has been tiring for the 25 years I've been hearing it. What exactly are they not covering about Seattle's downtown today that you think they should be? Why do you think that their opinion staff influence the news coverage so much? In short, if the Seattle Times has a conservative bias in its news coverage, why does the Wall Street Journal famously have a liberal-biased newsroom?

Schiendelman 3mo ago
Why is Seattle impacted worse? Because so much of our office space was tech companies that decided they didn't need as much office space and can do their work remotely. Look up the old owner and you'll realize why it doesn't really matter that they're taking a massive loss, and why I don't really care. I left it out because it's already a long comment and that's not really relevant. They could have written an article about how foreclosures on office buildings take a long time and that sublet offerings in Seattle are turning over at a healthy rate. And the owner of a company in media absolutely influences that coverage, why do you think everybody's worried about CBS, or for a long time Fox News?

nighthawk454 3mo ago

This tracks with what I’ve heard around as well. What changed in the financial instruments? My understanding is a lot of the loans have gone PIK or otherwise essentially aren’t serviceable at current prices. Do you think that’s resolvable somehow or just lagging implosion?

Schiendelman 3mo ago
Nothing changed in financial instruments - we just don't usually have a lot of office tenants decide to walk away like we have with the advent of remote work. The loans will work themselves out. We've seen a couple of buildings trade for way less than pre-Covid numbers, and we'll see more. In another 10 years downtown Seattle will be aligned with the rest of the market again.

jmyeet 3mo ago

I'm not sure the bank has that much to do with it. Commercial real estate valuation is based entirely on its ability to produce income. Lower the rent, lower the value. And that's a problem because most commercial leases are long (5-20+ years) so you're locking in an asset writedown for a long period of time. So it can be better to leave it vacant and pretend the value hasn't changed. You can still run into problems with this (eg servicing the loan). So I don't think it's quite the issue that banks have to approve lowering the rent so much as the owner might lower their asset value and have problems with the LTV and DSCR so the bank may then require you to refinance or add capital. By the way, we've gone through this before. Up until the 1990s, law firms were by far the largest tenants of office space because they had very large law libraries. Then that went online and they downsized. This was an acpolaypse in the 2000s combined with the dot-com bust. I think the lag you're talking about is on banks essentially foreclosing on a building and selling it off, allowing the new owners to charge less because they paid less.

Schiendelman 3mo ago
Yes, that's exactly the lag I'm talking about. The banks won't allow the buildings to lease for less than they need to make per sqft to pay back their loans. They'd rather foreclose, apparently. There's some reporting around this recently, I'm not in a position to look it up today but it should be easy to find!
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- awakeasleep 3mo ago
  [dead]

xnx 3mo ago

Is there any more to this story than "extend and pretend" that's been going on for 6 years?

Schiendelman 3mo ago
Tell me more? As commercial leases are ending the owners are finally having to accept foreclosure or sell.
randsorex 3mo ago
CRE also includes warehouses, multifamily apartments, retail, hotels, data centers, medical. I think we kind of lucked out that we had the start of boom in 2023 instead of a recession. The diversification has allowed the office space price to correct without a contagion. As a general rule, any snappy memorable line like "extend and pretend" is almost always wrong and a distortion after awhile. The idea sticks around longer than it should because it is memorable, not because it has anything to do with reality.

dlcarrier 3mo ago

In Bellevue, office vacancies are low because most have long term tenants… Well yeah, Bellevue isn't trying to drive all of the office tenants out of their city.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
halestock 3mo ago
I'll bite, how's Seattle doing that?
- thorncorona 3mo ago
  Crime. Everyone moves from DT Seattle to the eastside when they start a family. It’s normalized at this point, where if you see a potential threat u just walk across the street and go on with your business. Hostile business environment. Jumpstart, inflationary wage environment, etc. Living in DT Seattle is just meh. Expensive and the food scene is terrible due to local labor policies. Inability to get anything done from the local govt. Wilson spent her campaign promising to make it easier to build housing and just gave in to nimby interests again. Local politics is lunacy. Constant issues with the the unhoused population but it’s ok let’s just keep pushing it to little Saigon / Chinatown! Close your eyes since it doesn’t happen if you’re in Wallingford, QA, or Ballard! Fewer and fewer major cos investing into the area. And then there’s 0 transit enforcement or even any attempt at it. We don’t even have fare gates on the link for gods sake. It’s just completely absurd how mismanaged this city is, despite how much potential there is. Nowadays more and more offices opening in Bellevue.
- murderfs 3mo ago
  They passed a tax on basically just Amazon in 2018 and there were rumblings of Amazon leaving the city for Bellevue/Redmond. The city council repealed it within a month and things quieted down, but then COVID happened, they passed basically the same tax again, and this time it stuck. Since then, Amazon's been slowly leaving Seattle for the eastside by moving employees as their building leases expire: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-no-longer-seattles-no-1-employer-as-head-count-dips-below-50k/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-no-longe...

naturalmovement 3mo ago

> The Seattle Times has always been a conservative rag The Seattle Times is Left-Center with a high credibility rating. [1] Such a deliberate distortion of the facts renders the rest of your screed null and void. [1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/seattle-times/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/seattle-times/

lukeschlather 3mo ago
They're looking at national politics, and on that score, yes, the ST is liberal. When it comes to local politics the Seattle Times is conservative. Your objection is a bit like people who object that the Democrats are conservatives, from a European perspective, except this is about the city itself. The current mayor is liberal, the previous mayor was conservative. They're both Democrats and would be defined as liberals by your factcheck, but that's a different rubric than the one we're talking about.
- siren2026 3mo ago
  As a European, Democrats are absolutely not conservative from a European perspective. There are multiple dimensions but at least socially they push everything further to the left than in Europe. (Which is also in my opinion why they are losing elections) Almost every social topic is pushed to the extreme left by the Democrats. Simply look at how many weeks abortion is allowed in blue state and compare with most European countries. Most European countries are way more conservative. Economically yes, they are more conservative but even that is now changing as well (see: New York and AOC).
  - brookst 3mo ago
    How do Democrats’ policies on health care, paid leave from work, unions, public funding of political campaigns, and public transit compare to European conservatives? If you’re a single-issue abortion voter, yes the US democrats tend to propose fetal viability (22 weeks or so) as the limit, while most of Europe is 12 weeks. UK and Netherlands are 24. But if you genuinely believe US democrats are wildly liberal, you must be that rare European Fox News watcher.

IG_Semmelweiss 3mo ago

What are the financial "instruments" ? The main claims from the article seem worrysome, IN particular, the 37% vacancy rate, as well as multiple buildings underwater[3], etc. Now, lets dissect the claims that this is part of some cycle, and not the result of new city hall management. The reality is that with Jumpstart, and with the vacancy rate, enterprises are not renting. But, the owner is stuck with the asset in what is now a hostile jurisdiction. So, even if owner may not be able to change terms on their mortgage, they certainly can charge less for rent. Empty units do not contribute to cash flows to pay the building mortage. I understand there may be consequences to lowering rents, but those consequences are coming home anyway: The building will need to be sold, at a loss, by the bank to a new owner. And as you said, that process takes time. And the jurisdiction seems hellbent to make it harder. Now, as buildings sell, this in turn lowers the appraised value, which is key to the Seattle tax base. So, the downtown core is going to produce far less in property taxes in the foreseeable future, with fewer tenants paying (at least in short term) occupancy taxes, etc. This is going to play out in a decade. According to this, commercial property taxes are about 26 %[1] of the Seattle budget Let's assume appraisals go down 50% for those impaired offices. This is not crazy, there's precendent for it[2]. That means the Seattle budget must be cut by 13%. This is not even factoring other losses from job loss, sales tax lost, etc. Maybe that's not "Seattle is dying" , but sound pretty bad ? [1] https://www.seattle.gov/documents/departments/financedepartment/19proposedbudget/revenueoverview.pdf https://www.seattle.gov/documents/departments/financedepartm... [2] Seattle/downtown office properties lost ~$10–15+ billion in assessed value since 2020 (46–48% drop) . https://cdn.downtownseattle.org/app/uploads/2026/06/New-Report-JumpStart-Promised-Growth.-Seattle-Got-an-Economic-Slowdown-1.pdf https://cdn.downtownseattle.org/app/uploads/2026/06/New-Repo... [3] https://www.king5.com/article/money/business/downtown-seattle-association-business-climate-report/281-58f97cb0-b256-4444-a9b6-385dafe830ff https://www.king5.com/article/money/business/downtown-seattl...

Schiendelman 3mo ago
The financial instruments are commercial real estate loans. Those loans often do not allow the borrower to charge lower rent. Property taxes are not calculated that way. The property tax rate for a given year is backed into (a "mill rate") based on approved dollars of spending divided by total property value. If total citywide property value drops by 50%, the property tax rate doubles that year. So no, the property value changes aren't really an issue.

edg5000 3mo ago

Your argument is that it's simply because of dropping prices. Maybe that does explain the bulk of it. But the article seems to suggest it's the WFH transition. How much of the vacancy rate would be explained by that?

brookst 3mo ago
Is there any reason to think WFH rates would differ between Seattle and Bellevue? I’m not super knowledgeable in this area but GP is right the The Seattle Times is a very partisan outlet that spins confirmation bias into everything. Left-leaning politicians elected? The rain is their fault. Centrists (because this is Seattle)? They’re doing the best they can, maybe give more money to Amazon?
carljungslabtek 3mo ago
I can tell you specifically that Indeed dropped its footprint because of WFH. They moved into that building during covid, then shortly after introduced permanent work from home / hybrid. The other person’s point about rents probably explains the continued emptiness but WFH definitely drove the abandonment. And that newspaper does suck.
Schiendelman 3mo ago
"Explained by" is complicated - 100,000 square feet of empty space that is leased to a company and unused is not vacant.

expedition32 3mo ago

Cities don't die they just go into hibernation for a few decades only to wake up and grow stronger. The whole office real estate thing operates on a boom bust cycle.

carlosjobim 3mo ago

> However, when a space loses a tenant, the bank can't just drop the price for the owner, the same as you can't just pay less on your mortgage if you get a lower paying job. You can always pay less on your mortgage or any other debts if you are in a crisis and negotiate with the lenders. They prefer this immensely over not receiving anything at all. And in the long run they also receive more interest this way. It's very common especially for businesses to enter these kind of negotiations with the banks, and not very uncommon for individuals either. So it makes much better sense for everybody involved to sublet these spaces for market value, even if that income doesn't cover the original mortgage, because something is better than nothing. Somewhere there's a giant perverse incentive in situations like this.