A weekend topic starting with Market Watch. "Wit Solberg founded Mission Peak Capital in 2008 to snap up messy commercial real-estate assets after the last big crisis. A dozen years later, he’s looking to untangle another kind of property mess, but this time on behalf of others. Solberg invested in European loan servicer Mount Street Group to help borrowers and international stakeholders in U.S. commercial real-estate figure out, for a fee, where they might stand as buildings start to reopen."

"'Korean investors have been devastated, and are the most aggrieved party in the U.S. during COVID,' Solberg told MarketWatch. 'And it’s because they don’t know what they’ve gotten themselves into and they have no service provider to help.'"

From WSB TV on Georgia. "Channel 2 Action News investigative reporter Justin Gray talked with landlords who are facing foreclosure. 'So they put this moratorium on evictions. But where does that leave you?' Gray asked Paxton Baety. 'In trouble. Because I have to pay for somebody to live somewhere,' Baety said."

"Baety started with one rental home near his DeKalb County house and then over the years added two more. Now as he battles to recover from a stroke that has affected his speech and mobility, he’s also dealing with a loss of most of the rental income he relies on to pay his family’s bills. Baety is trying to sell this home. Because with the tenant paying nothing for nearly a year, he is in danger of foreclosure. 'If I don’t pay my mortgage, I get put out,' Baety said."

Fox 9 on Minnesota. "Minnesota housing officials have launched a $375 million federally-backed rental assistance program after several weeks of bureaucratic delays. Christina Harding, a property manager in St. Paul, said some of her tenants are 10 months behind on their rents. Without income, Harding said she was forced to collect unemployment. 'We're very excited for this program. Hopefully, it starts paying quickly,' she said, 'so we can get these owners' mortgages paid again and they don’t have to worry about when the rent’s going to come in.'"

From Finger Lakes 1 in New York. "State lawmakers and landlord advocacy groups joined in calling for Governor Andrew Cuomo and Democrat-controlled chambers of the legislature to avoid extending the eviction moratorium in place right now. Under One Roof recently conducted a survey, which found that 42% of small landlords have used personal loans and savings to cover expenses such as mortgages, property taxes, and utility bills."

"In the Finger Lakes, Deb Hall, who serves as President of the Finger Lakes Landlord Association said there can be a common sense solution to the current situation. 'The Democrat Majority and governor have taken away our property rights during this pandemic. Rental providers are calling for common sense by allowing the well-equipped court system to align renters with public housing services, some of which have funding to help renters, and to clean up the pre-COVID cases that continue to languish in non-payment.'"

From Bisnow New York. "Investment sales volume plunged across the board at the start of 2021, with commercial transactions down by nearly 50% year-over-year. A total of eight retail buildings traded during the quarter, per Avison Young’s figures, and almost all of those sales were either vacant or bought by an end user, per the brokerage. The average price of $1,996 was up from 2020, according to Avison Young, but down nearly 50% from $3,485 in the peak of 2016."

"A recent valuation of one Fifth Avenue retail property, for example, pegged its worth at just $37.8M — a 70% drop from six years ago. Last October, three retail properties on Madison Avenue sold for $1,340 per SF, a reported 80% drop from 2014. 'It's bouncing around right now, it's trying to find the floor,' said Avison Young Tri-State Investment Sales Group Head James Nelson."

The Houston Chronicle in Texas. "The impacts of February’s winter storm and Houston’s oversupply of apartments stood out in Camden Property Trust’s first quarter earnings report, driving up expenses in Texas markets and revenues down in Houston. All three of Camden’s Texas markets — Houston, Dallas and Austin — saw net operating income fall in the first quarter compared to the same properties in the same quarter a year before."

"In Houston, where Camden is looking to sell properties, the average rent per apartment fell at the majority of its properties in the first quarter compared to all of 2020. At the worst-hit property, Camden Downtown, the average rent per apartment fell $226, or 9 percent, during that period. 'The big challenge we have in Houston is not employment related,' said Keith Oden, vice chairman of the board. 'The issue in Houston is just supply… Last year, we dealt with 20,000 apartments delivered in Houston. This year, we’re dealing with another 20,000.'"

The San Francisco Chronicle in California. "If all that seems like a recipe for the city’s rents to start climbing again, conflicting data and lingering anxiety for both landlords and tenants point to a more complicated reality. 'Most landlords that I talk to, they’re panicked about the market,' said Ray Amouzandeh, principal broker with Targa Residential Brokerage. 'They’re saying ‘God, is anybody renting?'"

From Bloomberg on California. "For the first time in more than 25 years, San Francisco is forecasting that its property tax base will fall - a decline that reflects the tough straits of the city that is among the hardest hit by the pandemic downturn. That tax base, the real estate values the city uses to calculate taxes, rarely drops even in the worst of times, thanks to a quirk in California law dating back to 1978. Not even the dot-com bust or the 2008 financial crisis was capable of nudging it lower."

"'San Francisco's almost got a state of emergency in its economics,' said Ken Rosen, professor emeritus at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley who focuses on real estate. With an expected fall in commercial property values, 'there's no question that's going to make the city have very tight budgets the next few years.'"

"'Historically, offices have been a huge generator of revenue in San Francisco,' said Megan Elliott, who manages a team of residential and commercial property appraisers for the city. Pointing to Salesforce's high-profile cancellation of a lease, Ms Elliott said: 'if that kind of thing continues to happen, it's going to leave us all wondering what do we do with that space now and what kind of value does it have?'"

From Housing Today on the UK. "Prices now down 14% amid glut of supply as Rightmove says landlords working hard to avoid empty homes. The firm said that available stock in the capital is a fifth higher than at the same point last year, while outside London the availability of stock has sharply reduced. Two thirds of London boroughs now have rents lower today than five years ago, the firm said. Over the last five years the biggest falls have been in some of the wealthiest locations, including Barnes, Notting Hill and Knightsbridge, the firm said."

"The Rightmove data follow figures from build to rent landlord Grainger earlier this year showing that one in ten of its rental properties were lying empty. Rightmove’s director of property data Tim Bannister said that landlords in London 'obviously couldn’t foresee the effect that covid would have on rents, and right now they’ll be doing all they can to prevent voids and hope the drop in rents is fleeting.'"

From ABC News in Australia. "Sydney and Melbourne landlords (on average) have been forced to lower their rents (by 4.9 and 8.2 per cent) over the past year. 'Current tenants have been known to make demands of rental decreases knowing that they have their landlords over a barrel,' said Melbourne real estate agent Aly Walsh. 'There are many landlords willing to take the lower rent just to get their property leased. A friend of mine was approached by her Carlton tenant, who pretty much demanded an unreasonable decrease, and advised if they didn’t get the decrease they would leave knowing that were plenty of options at lower rents. The agent confirmed this, so my friend took the cut.'"

From The Bulwark. "WeWork subleases buildings that it holds under long-term leases but does not own. By the mid-2010s, it had become 'the largest lessee of office space in all of New York City.' Rather than thinking of WeWork as merely a company that subdivides real estate, cofounder and former CEO Adam Neumann claims in one interview that the firm’s purpose is to 'elevate the world’s consciousness.'"

"Did employees, customers, and journalists really buy into that patter? The documentary suggests, echoing the once-invincible status of Enron, that there was a reluctance to ask difficult or probing questions about WeWork’s questionable profitability or chaotic internal affairs. Some of this was probably a kind of bandwagon effect; it can be fun to believe in something, or even to be taken for a ride. But also crucial was Neumann’s charisma, with which he was able to hold off a lot of scrutiny. He appeared to believe fervently things that would, once detached from his aura, come across as nonsense or BS."

"Most of mainstream journalism was useless on this front. It took Justin Zhen of Thinknum, a data company, to analyze publicly available data and determine that WeWork’s churn, or turnover rate, was high and accelerating. And it took marketing professor Scott Galloway to do some relatively simple math on building values and determine that WeWork was massively overvalued."

"While at one point in the documentary Neumann makes fun of startups that don’t turn a profit, it turns out he was in the same boat. Galloway, whose screen time is brief but incisive, explains that WeWork effectively invented financial metrics: 'We want to pretend to be profitable by ignoring these expenses.'"

"The documentary suggests but doesn’t really plunge into an important global-finance rabbit hole: the saga of holding company and venture capitalist fund SoftBank, a major investor and now the majority owner of WeWork. SoftBank is based in Japan but a lot of its money comes from Saudi Arabia via its sovereign wealth fund. And so the WeWork pump-up was about more than Americans being easily impressed by a startup; there was also a foreign 'gotta put money in something' angle."

"The notion that WeWork was an example of the 'sharing economy'—a term rarely used unironically anymore but embraced by Neumann—is as silly as the notion that it isn’t a real-estate firm. The imperative to grow necessarily conflicts with the ideal of 'sharing.' Uber ended up adding congestion to urban streets and leasing cars to its drivers; WeWork ended up leasing slapdash offices to Microsoft at cut-rate prices."