A look at some of the bigger discount sales of large commercial properties in recent years

Bond market expert and economic content creator, Steven Van Metre dives into the most recent large value drop on a huge office building.  Most of the investors in the $277 million bond on this building will be wiped out, and even investors in the highest and safest tranche will take big losses.  He cites a report about the Wells Fargo "Cash Register" building in Denver.  

Reminder: Recessions are when the whole world goes on sale, and almost no one wants to buy  

OK, officially we are not in recession, but...  Here are a few of the big commercial discount sales in recent years.

Brookfield sells 601 S. Figuroa office tower in downtown L.A. at 42% loss (June 2025)

Los Angeles County buys Gas Company Tower for $200 million (69% loss in value over 5 years)

Brookfield Corp owned Gas Company Building in L.A. goes into receivership- 2023

New York City office towers, 135 West 50th Street, sells for 97.5% discount (2024)

Two Denver office towers sell for 90% loss (2025)

The tallest building in Fort Worth, Texas sells at auction for 91% loss

65 story Chicago office tower sells at 85% loss

Portland, Oregon office tower known as "Big Pink" sells for $45 million- an 88% discount to the 2015 price (2025)

The Irvine Company sells 401 B Street office tower in San Diego for 71% loss (2025)

San Francisco office tower, 410 Townsend Street, sells for 74% loss (2024)

Blackstone sells office complex in Santa Ana, CA for 36% loss

I actually worked in this complex for a short time in the 1990's, it sits next to the 55 freeway in Santa Ana, not too far from Irvine and John Wayne (Orange County) airport.

CNBC TV (2024)- "The real estate debt problem still hasn't been dealt with..." 

Bloomberg Television (2023): "The Debt Crisis Looming in Commercial Real Estate

Epic Economist YouTube channel: "Commercial Real Estate Crash Triggers Huge Property Value Drop and Hit 2008 Levels (Late 2024/early 2025)

The Investor Who Profited from Dying Malls is Now Betting Big on Empty Offices

These are just a few of the biggest properties that have sold at massive discounts in recent years, along with empty stores and dead malls before that.  These sales are intentionally being kept out of the major media and search engines, to keep the "Economy is fine" narrative going, apparently.  

Most of these types of sales, the bigger ones anyhow, are reported in local TV newscasts, local newspaper sites, or local business journal newspapers and websites.  You need to subscribe to many of these sites to read the whole story.  If you started digging, you could find many more similar sales.  The point here is to simply show that quite a few sales with losses in the tens of million dollars are happening, and thousands more buildings are still under used with high vacancy rates, or sitting vacant, maybe completely abandoned, in some cases.  

SOMEONE, banks, investors, REIT's, or major corporations, are taking huge losses on these sales.  They are also going to a lot of trouble in the media/social media works to keep all of this out of the public eye.  

Blogger's note- 8/11/2025- In an amazing little bit of synchronicity, the Los Angeles Times newspaper, this morning, has a front page, above the fold story about an L.A. skyscraper building that's in the planning process to be renovated into "deluxe" apartments.  I've heard that there are a lot of structural issues to overcome doing that type of conversion, but that's great, if the developer can make it happen.  I have a feeling they may run into some funding issues in the next 2-4 years, but time will tell.  The "LA Graffiti Towers" are a project that lost funding, twice, and they now sit partially built, and abandoned.  Click the link to learn their story.  

I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform specifically designed for writers.  Check out the companion post, "Simulpocalypse- Post #8" that goes with this blog post.  Or check the main page here:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

The Pacific Ring of Fire is waking up. What does that mean for us in Southern California?

Meteorologist Bill Martin explains the Pacific Subduction Zone, and shows some great graphics to help visualize what's happening in the Pacific Ring of Fire lately. He also repeatedly says to just "be calm" during an earthquake, and just act intelligently.  The majority of the time, very few people are injured in earthquakes, even large ones.

Over the last few weeks, I started having videos pop up on YouTube about earthquakes and volcanoes around the Pacific Ring of Fire.  I didn't think much about it.  I watched a video about the earthquake swarm around Mount Rainier in early July and thought, "Hey, maybe the Ring of Fire is waking up a bit."  The big earthquakes since in Alaska and Kamchatka, and Kamchatka region tsunami, along with other quakes, make it seem like we're heading into a more active period around the Pacific Ring of Fire.  

For any who don't know, the Pacific Ring of Fire is the name for the line of tectonic plate seams that go up the west coast of South America, through Central America, up the American and Canadian west coast, along the southern Alaska coast, peninsula, Aleutian Island chain, over to the Russian east coast, down through the east coast of China, Japan, through Indonesia, and through the western Pacific islands to New Zealand.  

Because of all these major and minor plates of the earth grinding together, this Ring has lots of earthquakes and lots of volcanoes.  Watch the 15 minute video above for a good explanation of why these earthquakes are happening in these areas, why some volcanoes are a bit more active, and what this means for us here in California, and along the North American Pacific Coast.  Don't believe the crazy hype videos.  This group of plate seams and faults seams to be getting more active, but that doesn't mean "The Big One" is coming next week, or that "California's going to fall into the ocean,"as so many people across the U.S. think.  California is not going to fall into the ocean.  The area west of the San Andreas fault will, in 30 or 40 million years, slowly carve away and become a big, 400 mile long island, off the shore of mainland California.  That's millions of years away. 

Bill Martin explains in the video above why a large earthquake off the coast of the far north part of California is our biggest threat.  That could lead to tsunami damage in the Bay Area, and maybe to the L.A. area, to a small extent.  Maybe.  But down here in Southern California, that's not a major threat.  Again, watch that video for a better understanding of what this recent activity in around the Ring of Fire does and does not mean.  Below are videos about the larger earthquakes and volcanic activity this year, to learn more, if you're interested.  

 Five of the eight earthquakes over 7.0 in 2025 have been around the Pacific Ring of Fire

July 29, 2025- 8.8 earthquake/tsunami off coast of Kamchatka region of Russia's east coast

Volcano eruption in Kamchatka after 8.8 quake, but not caused by the quake directly

July 20, 2025- 7.4 earthquake of coast of Kamchatka region in Russia

May 4, 2025- 7.4 earthquake off the coast of Chile

July 16, 2025- 7.3 earthquake/tsunami warning off the coast of the western peninsula of Alaska

March 20, 2025- 7.0 earthquake off the coast of Tonga

July 8th week, 2025- Swarm of over 300 small earthquakes in Mount Ranier region, south of Seattle, Washington  No eruption expected, it hasn't erupted for over 1,000 years.

Late July, 2025- Axial Seamount- active underwater volcano off of the coast of Oregon has also had swarms of small earthquakes  This volcano is far enough offshore and is not believed to pose a serious threat to humans.  Scientists are monitoring it, including with sensors and underwater video cameras, and expect to learn a lot during this period of heightened activity.

My tweet from July 17-" #ringoffire firing up?   Or just getting a bit restless?"  That was a day after the big quake off of Alaska, and after I had watched the video about the Mount Ranier mini-quake swarms, and a short video about the Axias Seamount underwater volcano off Oregon, which had been in the news.  It seemed like a potential trend, by that point.  I tweeted this before the 7.4 and 8.8 Kamchatka quakes.  Yep, Kamchatka seems to have answered that question.  

Mary's Monster- the story of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and the creation of "Frankenstein"

Mary's Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein, the visual book by Lita Judge, is an incredible work of art.  It's a visual take on the story of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who wrote one of the most classic horror tales of all time, Frankenstein.  This book kept catching my eye at the local library, where I work every day.  Finally I picked it up and absorbed it.  I didn't just read it, it has over 300 incredible paintings, every page a full bleed to the edges.  I spent time checking out all the images that Lita Judge spent five years painting.  Mary's Monster is a haunting take on the tragic, yet incredible, life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

"At 17 I am already the mother of bones and daughter to a ghost."

-Mary Shelley, quoted in Mary's Monster

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley saw far more than her share of tragedy in her life.  She was also a very intelligent young woman, and incredibly well read for a woman in the early 1800's.  Have any of you read Dante's Inferno?  I haven't.  But Mary Shelley read it, and other classics, as a teenager.  She wrote the novel, Frankenstein- or The Modern Prometheus, when she was only 18 and 19-years-old.  

Not only did she, as a young woman, write a novel that invented the concept of science fiction, it was a deep and brutal look at humanity, a brilliant social commentary that still stands up today.  She also created a fictional creature, Dr. Frankenstein's monster, that is still iconic today, 207 years later.  Frankenstein, her first novel, has been in print for the entire time since, over 200 years.  

After going through Mary's Monster twice, I realized that I needed to read the original Frankenstein.  It was not the book I thought it was, not even close.  We all have our pictures of the monster, big blocky head, bolts coming out of his neck, but those are from the endless series of movie, TV show, and Halloween versions of Frankenstein's monster.  The monster in Shelley's novel is much different, and highly intelligent.  Frankenstein, over 200 years later, is a brilliant novel, and it's a story of revenge and tragedy, but in a much different way than I thought.  I realized that, probably like many people, I didn't really know the story of Dr. Frankenstein, and his monster, at all.  

I've never been a big comic book or graphic novel reader.  Super heroes didn't do it for me as a kid.  No super hero was around when I could have used one as a kid, so I never got really into comics.  I was a nerd, but not a comic book nerd.  

Around age 30, though, I worked for a small furniture moving company in Huntington Beach, California.  Our moving company office was at a very unique shopping center called Sea Cliff, and there was a small comic book shop in the shopping center, a couple doors away.  On days when we finished up working early, I started going to the comic shop, and just browsing all the comics out then.  That was in 1996 and 1997.  I saw a bunch of comic series that were more interesting to me, stories that were not just super heroes in spandex with extraordinary powers.  There were much more complex and interesting stories being told in comics and graphic novels.  During that era, I read two Alan Moore classics, Watchmen and V for Vendetta, I read Neil Gaiman's The Sandman later on, some Spawn issues, and bought a few issues of Sin City, which had really cool black and white art.  There was one comic that I really loved, Seekers into the Mystery, written by J.M. DeMatteis.  I bought and read every single issue of that series.  That was is the best comic series I've read, personally.  I didn't get into any other graphic novels after that, but I'd check them out from time to time, to see if there were any other stories that interested me.  

Mary's Monster is not really a traditional graphic novel, it's a story told through a collection of paintings and a small amount of verse.  I'm not going to go into any more detail, but if this post interested you at all, find a copy of Mary's Monster, and check it out.  It's a great work of art telling an amazing true story.  You may get drawn into the tragic story of Mary Shelley, and maybe you'll wind up reading the actual novel, Frankenstein, like I did.  

I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform designed specifically for writers, check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

There are no paid links in this post. 

Canada... patiently waiting for Trump and MAGA to destroy U.S. so they can take over...

 Peacefully waiting, just to the north, Canada knows Trump and MAGA will continue to destroy the U.S. economy, then American society.  At some point Canadians will be able to take over, clean up the mess, and create a functional country out of what is now the United States.  It's only a matter of time.

I've been kicked off of Facebook (or hacked)

 I got into my Facebook account this morning, and went to click on a message, and got the whole, "Your computer is infected!" thing.  I'm on a library computer, so I just had to shutdown and restart it.  

I haven't been able to log directly into Facebook for months before this, I had to put in my phone number (for the phone that got stolen a year ago, I never got a new phone) log in indirectly for a while now.  In any case, I cannot log into Facebook at all now, and appear to have lost that account.  

The funny thing is, I don't really care.  Facebook has gone downhill so much in recent years, I don't even know if I want to bother getting a new account.  If you are someone I know, and find this because you can't contact me on FB, feel free to email me at stevenemig13@gmail.com to reconnect.  I'm still on Twitter (surprisingly) @steveemig43, and I'm still on Pinterest, which actually does have a message function, though I never check it.  Moving on.  

Blogger's note- 7/17/2025- I spent 20 minutes or more trying to get back on FB yesterday when this happened.  It kept saying my account no longer existed.  A couple hours later, I came back, got online, and tried again, just for the hell of it.  And I got back into my account.  I don't know what the fuck is going on...

Blogger's note- 10:18 am- 7/18/2025- OK, Now I'm blocked from getting into FB again.  The phone number they have is a phone that got stolen a year ago... long gone.  Jeeeeeez...

Edgar Cayce: The Most Documented Psychic in History

This documentary tells the basic story of the life of Edgar Cayce, best known as the most documented psychic in American, and probably all, history.  He lived from 1877 to 1945.  

In his 20's, Edgar Cayce learned to put himself into a trance-like state, where other people would ask him questions, and he would tap into some other levels of information, including something he called the Akashic Record.  Over 14,000 of these readings, as they were called, were documented by a stenographer, and then transcribed and organized.  The material covered was mostly health readings, to diagnose and find treatments for illnesses and injuries for thousands of different people.  But he also gave "life readings," which dove into the history of individual people.  It was those readings that spoke of past lives, reincarnation, ancient Egypt, the "lost" civilization of Atlantis, and many other topics.  

Edgar was a devout Christian throughout his whole life.  At age 13, he decided to read the Bible, the whole thing, start to finish.  During the rest of his life, he read the entire Bible once for every year of his life, 67 times in total.  He taught Sunday school from his teen years on.  He worked several different jobs, but spent many years working as a photographer with his own small shop.  He moved a few times around the eastern U.S., and at one point tried to use his abilities to strike it rich in the oil boom in Texas.  He married a woman named Gertrude, they had two boys, and eventually settled in Virginia Beach, Virginia, led by suggestions in his psychic readings.  

With the help of some investors from Wall street, he opened a small hospital in Virginia Beach, where people could be treated by doctors and nurses, using the treatments suggested in his health readings.  Thousands of people, including Edgar himself, and his oldest son, Hugh Lynn Casey, were helped by Edgar's health readings, through serious ailments and injuries.  When Edgar woke up from his readings, he had no idea what information had come through him, which is why a stenographer (a woman writing in shorthand, taking detailed notes) was necessary, to accurately compile the information received.    

Edgar's readings predicted the stock crash of 1929, earlier that year.  He predicted in the early 1900's that some day doctors would be able to take a single drop of blood and diagnose what's wrong with a patient.  He predicted that the obscure Jewish sect, the Essenes, would become more prominent in the future.  Many years later, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in Israel, which shed light on the Essenes.  He also predicted things that didn't happen, like the Earth's poles shifting in the 20th century.  But he said that the future is not predestined, it can change, depending on what we do in the present.  

Near the end of his life, in the 1940's during World War II, Edgar Cayce did as many as 8 readings a day.  The readings took a lot out of him, and he pushed himself to physical exhaustion, while trying to help as many people as he could.  Edgar Cayce died in 1945, months before World War II ended, at age 67.  

Below are talks given by different scholars of Edgar Cayce's readings, on a few different subjects.  There are dozens more talks on many different subjects that came through the 14,000+ psychic readings of Cayce.  This post is just a little introduction into the life of this regular man who could tap, somehow, into extraordinary pools of information and knowledge.  

If you find him interesting, you can research more about him on your own.  You can also join the A.R.E., the non-profit Association for Research and Enlightenment, which Cayce started late in his life, and which continues on today.  The link to their website is below.  There are also several books, most published in the mid 20th century, on different subjects, based on information in his many readings.  

A.R.E. Center of New York- John Van Auken- Edgar Cayce's Story of the Soul

The Meaning of Dreams- Kevin Todeschi, ARE CEO

Edgar Cayce Arizona- "What is My Ideal?"- John Schroeder & Steve Bobbitt

John Van Auken- Going from Karma to Grace

There is a River- The Story of Edgar Cayce- by Thomas Sugrue  (Not a paid link)

Edgar Cayce's A.R.E. (Association for Research and Enlightenment)

Half a million page views and over 1050 posts...

This blog just crossed the 500,000 page view threshold.  Cool.

As I said in the post a couple of days ago, I don't know where the big chunks of page views are coming from.  This has been happening over the last 1 1/2 to two years, maybe.  This blog has 1,062 posts, but there are a few I started and never finished, so the real number is 1,050 to 1,055 published posts, just on this blog.  This blog has about 200,000 or so "normal" page views, which is damn good for a weird, niche blog.  Then it has around 300,000 page views that have come in big chunks, thousands in a day, from around the world.  Bots?  AI searches?  People using VPN's to check it out?  Something else?  I don't know.  

On all the blogs I've done since my first, really lame, taxi blog in 2007, I've written somewhere over 2,800 blog posts, most pretty meaty, at least 400-500 words, sometimes more than 1,000 words.  Those assorted blogs have pulled in over 800,000 total page views.  For all intents and purposes, I've made almost no money off of all of that writing.  I have a handful of people that support me on Patreon, about $65 a month total, for a year and a half or so.  A number of people have given me small amounts here and there, mostly because I've been homeless much of the time I've been blogging.  I really do appreciate that support, and I thank all of you who have read my posts, and helped me out.  

I have sold well over 100 Sharpie Scribble Style drawings, many of them to readers of this blog, over the last ten years.  But that income isn't directly from the blog itself.  I've written all these posts because I enjoy doing them, and because I wasn't able to find "a real job" for many years, after working as a taxi driver.  So I had a lot of time on my hands.  

I'm building up my Substack site, which is designed to actually earn money as a writer, and I'm working to earn a decent income from that, at some point.  I will shamelessly ask all of you for your support on Substack (probably about $7 a month or so) when I can get a bank account, and the other things needed to get the paid subscriptions working.  

Thanks again for checking out my blog!  Again, I don't know where these big groups of views are coming from, but the counter hit half a million.  I'll keep adding a post now and then here, as I write mostly on Substack.  So check out my Substack for longer, in depth posts on a bunch of different subjects. 

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack  

Click on "No thanks" on the first page, to see the latest posts.  If you subscribe for free, it just means each post will come directly into your email.  I appreciate all subscribers, and when the paid subscription option happens, there will still be lots of stuff to view for free, but some posts and series will be for subscribers only.  

Right when I noticed the number of views, we had a little earthquake, a 2.7, right under this part of The Valley.  It felt like someone picked up the library a couple inches and dropped it.  I'll take that as a thumbs up from the Earth on hitting a big blog milestone.  Thanks again... enough babbling... onward!

Steve Emig

The White Bear

June 24, 2025