Contributing Writer: Jonathan Tong | May, 2024
The onset of the pandemic came with an exodus in office use. America’s ten largest cities saw their office utilization rates decrease by 80% as companies quickly adopted work-from-home (WFH). Even as the last vestiges of the pandemic fade away, offices remain much emptier than before, exposing an excess of office space in cities that could threaten the stability of the financial system and squeeze fiscal budgets to dangerous levels.
The NBER working paper Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse by Gupta, Mittal, and Nieuwerburgh (2022) attempts to quantify the damage already done and, more importantly, the damage yet to come.
The authors use New York City as a proxy for major metros. Since large cities primarily serve as financial hubs for companies employing high-skilled workers, they are most vulnerable to the pandemic’s shift to remote work. To assess the damage, leasing data from 105 markets across the United States were analyzed, including information on lease commencement and expiration, starting rent, and building classification. This data was studied in conjunction with information provided by the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts on leasing revenues, funds from operation (profitability), net rentable square feet, and occupancy rate.
The authors consolidate the data to create an asset valuation model. The model is applied over a ten-year horizon to determine potential losses in value. To account for uncertainty in the persistence of remote work, each future year is classified by two attributes: expansion or recession and WFH or non-WFH. Expansion or recession denotes whether the economy is experiencing GDP growth or decline. WFH or non-WFH denotes whether the dominant working condition is remote or in-person. The model applies a Markov chain to transition between the four potential states and forecast the path of the economy over the next ten years.
The authors highlight remote work and its persistence as the biggest drivers of office value declines during the pandemic and in the future. The authors calculate the probability of remote work persisting year after year to be 0.94, suggesting work-from-home to be a long-term shock. This predicted stickiness of remote work has decreased leasing activity nationwide, and the weakened demand has declined office values. The authors’ model estimates that NYC office values fell by 46.1% between 2019 and 2022, a $69.58 billion value destruction. If that percentage is extrapolated to all US office properties, the loss balloons to $506.31 billion. Over the next ten years, the model projects office values in 2029 to stabilize at 43.9% below its 2019 levels.
These substantial decreases in office values have damaging long-term repercussions.
One such consequence is that the declines in property values will lead to more underwater mortgages (a mortgage worth more than the value of the property). Underwater mortgages often lead to default as there is no economic incentive to pay for a mortgage that costs more than the benefit provided by the property. Scarily, we may already be seeing this consequence playing out. According to Trepp, a commercial real estate data and analysis firm, the delinquency rate (percentage of loans that failed to make a payment on time) for office-backed loans more than tripled between January 2023 and January 2024 to 6.3%, a warning of potential widespread default in the future (Buschbom, 2024). But that figure only accounts for loans that have already come up for renewal. Office mortgages signed prior to the pandemic tended to be longer-term leases, so a significant number of them have yet to make that decision to renew or walk away. The consequences we see playing out today are likely understating unrealized losses that will only reveal themselves with time – “a train wreck in slow motion,” as author Stijn Van Niewerburgh describes it.
In the case of default, the loss would be shared by both banks and investors unequally. The financing structure of office space is roughly 60% debt to 40% equity. The equity is the junior position (lower priority for repayment), so it is the first to absorb losses. Losses that exceed the value of the junior position are absorbed by the senior position, which are the mortgages issued by banks. Banks would also recoup the property as collateral if default occurs, though its value would be diminished.
Despite these buffers, the banking system is still expected to take a significant blow. Banks outside the “top 25” own 70% of bank-held CRE debt, equating to roughly 2.1 trillion dollars. In other words, the most vulnerable banks are regional and mid-sized banks that don’t have enough assets to withstand default in CRE loans. Earlier this year, regional lender New York Community Bank saw its stock price collapse after Moody’s downgraded its credit rating to junk status for its over-exposure to NY commercial real estate.
The more worrying implication is that the declines in commercial property values will lead to lower tax-assessed values on these properties, so these vacant buildings will generate less tax revenue for the city than before. New York City alone is projected to lose 2.5 billion dollars from lower commercial property tax revenues this year. A diminished municipal budget, which provides the primary funding for many public necessities like roads, education, and public safety, would likely decrease a city’s quality and, by extension, the welfare of its citizens. With increased vacancies and defaults, the drop in commercial tax revenue will further squeeze municipal budgets, creating a real danger of rapid city deterioration.
The authors do find a promising trend: Class A+ buildings were more resistant to the pandemic’s effects, a phenomenon called flight to quality. Class A+ buildings – the highest quality buildings on the market – saw leasing revenue fall by only 26.66% over the pandemic. By 2029, Class A+ buildings are expected to stabilize at values just 15.26% lower than 2019 values. Relative to their A-/B/C-class counterparts, Class A+ buildings showed much lower declines in value, a resilience that the authors believe can help stymie the effects of a future office crisis.
Converting non-Class A+ buildings to Class A+ buildings is one such measure, and it is perhaps the most logical. Alternative avenues, such as conversion to residential housing or recreational spaces, run into various logistical complications, such as architectural regulations and profitability concerns. Conversion to residential housing also remains attractive amidst a national affordable housing shortage.
One limitation of the paper is that its model, and by extension results, don’t account for future adaptation of vacant office space. Any future conversion of offices to more useful spaces or existing plans to repurpose vacant office space won’t affect the model’s results. Similarly, any future change in the office building supply is beyond the scope of the model and not captured in the results.
For now, cities still have time to respond, adapt, and evolve to the ever-changing circumstances of a post-pandemic world. However, it’s looking more and more like this is once again commercial real estate’s time of reckoning.
REFERENCE
Buschbom, S. (2024, February 1). CMBS Delinquency Rate Resumes Rise to Start 2024, Office Delinquency Rate Jumps. www.trepp.com. https://www.trepp.com/trepptalk/cmbs-delinquency-rate-resumes-rise-to-start-2024-office-delinquency-rate-jumps
Gupta, A., Mittal, V., & Van Nieuwerburgh, S. (2023, May 15). Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse. National Bureau of Economic Research. https://conference.nber.org/conf_papers/f183536.pdf
Mandzy, O. (2023, October 30). Q3 2023 Quarterly Data Review: Historic Volumes of Maturities as Office Troubles Persist. www.trepp.com. https://www.trepp.com/trepptalk/q3-2023-quarterly-data-review