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