Tuesday, May 5, 2020

"Commercial Real Estate Already Gets Hit in Europe: Prices for Retail Properties Plunge, Office Prices Sink"

I too had a dream:
October 2015
How To Convince Investors Your Startup Is Worth $10 Billion
There has got to be a way to short this....
July 2016
$16 Billion Valuation WeWork Cut Forecasts as CEO Asked Employees to Change ‘Spending Culture’
It has been a long cherished dream to figure out a way to bet against this one, links below....
Oh the fun we would have had.
Sure there were some CDS opportunities on the debt and some ancillary shorts on suppliers but for sheer enjoyment there is nothing like shorting an equity run by a scam artist who says:
November 2017
"WeWork: 'Our valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue.'"
Roger that, energy and spirituality. Over.... 
Shorting someone like that and watching his deal go to zero as you pocket the profit is one of the simple pleasures of spending time at the market.

From Wolf Street: 

“Wide bid-ask spread points to lower values” going forward. It just started.
Over the past few years, the various sectors of commercial real estate have split into different trajectories, with some property types, such as industrial and office, rising to new highs, and with retail properties dropping further and further. Then came the issues surrounding Covid-19 and the lockdowns.

The trajectories suddenly turned into the same direction: down for all, but to different degrees, some sectors barely ticking down and other sectors dropping more sharply. And retail properties plunged.
Here is a first taste of the dynamics in Europe, where the lockdowns started earlier than in the US – in Italy, local lockdowns started on February 21, nearly a month before the first local lockdown in the US, the San Francisco Bay Area.

Retail properties have long been suffering from the structural shift of where retail spending takes place, the shift from brick-and-mortar stores to ecommerce. This shift had been relentlessly progressing over the years. But in March and April, it exploded higher as brick-and-mortar stores were shut down and ecommerce operations boomed.

Tenants of retail properties are now having trouble paying rent, or are unwilling to pay rent, as their stores are closed. Some of them will go out of business altogether; others will attempt to stay in business but renegotiate their leases. This whole dynamic has accelerated, as many future years of more or less gradual change are now being distilled into a few months. It has thrown the retail property sector into turmoil.

According to the Green Street Pan-European Commercial Property Price Index, which tracks prices of retail properties in the 25 most liquid real estate markets in Europe, all three sub-indices dropped in April, from March. But prices of retail properties plunged during the month:
  • Retail properties: -15.1%
  • Office properties: -6.6%
  • Industrial properties -0.7%,
“Wide bid-ask spread points to lower values” going forward, the report by Green Street Advisors notes.....
....MUCH MORE

“For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 
"It might have been!.”
― John Greenleaf Whittier, "Maud Muller" via Poetry Archive