When Facebook committed to lease 67,800sq metres (730,000sq feet) of real estate at a former post office building in midtown Manhattan in 2020, New Yorkers from the mayor’s office to street vendors to the city’s real estate magnates cited the deal as evidence that office culture was not going to be another casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic.But the deal Facebook (which calls itself Meta Platforms now) got was hardly the windfall that the building owner, Vornado Realty Trust, described in its marketing. In fact, it was later revealed that Vornado agreed to pay $150m to Facebook as an incentive to close the deal.Despite bullish global commercial real estate outlooks from Big 4 accounting firms, the pandemic’s effect on the office subsector – in many ways the marquee slice of the global real estate industry – has been profound. Incentives like the one Facebook got, rent holidays, government stimulus and the long (often seven-to-ten year) leases typical in the office market have hidden the pain that the owners of this expensive real estate are feeling.
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