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A California real estate investor has purchased a distressed office building half a block from Willis Tower for 89% less than it traded for more than a decade ago, the latest example of the extreme losses that remote work and higher interest rates have dealt to office property values. Los Angeles-based Brog Properties this week paid $2.5 million in cash for the vintage 10-story office building at 216 W. Jackson Blvd.
Summary and audio linked here.
Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
The state’s existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis.
Full interview and summary linked here.
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I’ll bet this would have been cheaper if they waited to buy after the Dem convention
The risk Brog is taking is that he still believes there are small employers want low-cost, no-frills downtown office space. Those tenants are few and far between, especially when they can lease cheaper and nicer office space closer to home for the same or less cost. But that’s what investors do, they take investment risks, and they pan out or they don’t. If they aren’t investing, then there’s no reason to even come into the office. The larger issue is that now, four years after the start of ‘rona, is that the downtown office model is a HUGE PITA. My… Read more »
Man is Chicago in trouble.
Chicago will end up looking like Detroit on steroids before this thing is all over.
Props to Crain’s for cover the sad story of the urban doom loop candidly.