Episode 210: “Office Buildings: Will We Ever Go Back?” with John Scheurer
Release Date: 12/13/2022
Episode 219: “The Labor Department’s Radical Agenda” with Pat Pizzella
The Bill Walton Show
Under President Joe Biden and his Administration the whole of government has been weaponized to promote a so-called Diversity Equity and Inclusion agenda that, in fact, will bring about just the opposite of what these words mean. Case in point is an assertive, left-wing, anti-family Department of Labor with its power to regulate and attempt to social engineer virtually every aspect of the American workplace. Congress has granted it a stunning amount of power to administer more than 180 federal laws and thousands of regulations affecting more than 10 million employers and 150...
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Episode 218: “The Ugly Truth About the White House, the FBI and the Social Media Companies” with Jenin Younes and Todd Zywicki
The Bill Walton Show
Newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media. Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House—not voluntarily as the government has claimed. The emails emerged last month in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private...
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Episode 217: “Ukraine: It’s Time for Realism” with David Goldman and Stephen Bryen
The Bill Walton Show
The Biden Administration - and a majority of Republicans in Congress - persist in their bellicose rhetoric about an “existential war to defend Ukraine” telling the Russians that “we're going to destroy your regime and dissolve the Russian Federation.” Really? After sending more than $100 billion to Ukraine to fight a proxy war against Russia, have they thought through whether the US is capable of doing this? They are calling for actions that only a global hegemon might possess. But a hegemon that no longer controls its own borders, has crumbling critical infrastructure, hollowed...
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Episode 216: “What The Grateful Dead and Successful Dealmakers Have in Common” with Marc Morgenstern
The Bill Walton Show
Backstage with Bill Walton In this episode I compare notes and share stories with veteran dealmaker and entrepreneur Marc Morgenstern. In today’s polarized world, where people seem intent on not agreeing, Marc has had a long and successful career helping opposing sides come to agreement. He’s completed billions of dollars of M&A transactions, buying, selling, and financing businesses as a managing partner of law firm Kahn Kleiman and as a venture capitalist. Marc’s new book creatively reframes and radically changes how we can approach dealmaking of any...
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Episode 215: “To Shrink Government, Cut Taxes: How the States are Doing It” with Grover Norquist
The Bill Walton Show
For an excellent primer about how the politics of our over-complicated state and local tax systems operate, this conversation with Grover Norquist is absolutely the place to start. It's comprehensive, easy to understand and often humorous, as only Grover knows how to make it. (When Grover is not doing taxes, he’s doing stand-up comedy. For real, and he’s good at it.) As founder of Americans for Tax Reform, which opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle, no one in modern times has fought harder than Grover Norquist to shrink the state by keeping the issue of high taxes...
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Episode 214: “Ukraine, The Balloon and the Loss of US Hegemony” with Brandon Weichert.
The Bill Walton Show
Events are picking up pace rapidly on the world stage and I’ve asked my frequent guest Brandon Weichert to join me to help explain what’s happening. Brandon, geopolitical analyst and publisher of The Weichert Report, is among the best at connecting the dots globally with his bold and unnerving forecasts. Among the many issues brewing that we get into: Russia is amassing up to 400 thousand troops on Ukraine's borders for a winter offensive, objectives unknown. Nuclear escalation looms. The Chinese sent a satellite balloon hovering ominously across the entire United States as it...
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Episode 213: “It’s High Time for a Ceasefire in Ukraine” with Stephen Bryen and David P. Goldman
The Bill Walton Show
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds on, it’s nearly impossible for the ordinary observer to figure out what's really happening. One of the problems is that war news is generated primarily by Ukrainian propaganda, which is endlessly parroted in the Western media. Anytime there is contradictory information – for example, mention of Ukraine’s high casualties – Kiev pushes back so hard that Western leaders go silent. But what is clear is that looming on the horizon is the very real possibility of a nuclear war, as more and more European countries are drawn in to the...
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Episode 212: “The Truth about Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change” with Dr Jerome Corsi, PhD
The Bill Walton Show
“This whole climate hysteria seems to focus on a molecule - carbon dioxide (CO2) - which we humans exhale and which we release into the atmosphere by burning so-called fossil fuels,” explains my guest on this episode Jerome Corsi, PhD. But what are realities of CO2, who is behind the agenda to demonize it and - most importantly - who benefits? Dr. Corsi, author of the tour de force book The Truth about Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation, has the answers. Drawing extensively on scholarly published peer-reviewed...
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Episode 211: “It’s Happening According to Plan” with Kevin Freeman
The Bill Walton Show
If someone wanted to weaken, then destroy a sovereign and free United States, what would they do? Well they might start with surrendering its energy independence. Make war on reliable fossil fuels oil and gas, coal and nuclear power. Induce it to rely on wind and solar energy sources that are certain to lead to rolling blackouts and the ultimate failure of America’s electrical grid. And while they’re at it, persuade America to rely on China for most all of its wind and solar energy production technologies. Inflate its currency. Have the Federal Reserve print trillions of dollars of...
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Episode 210: “Office Buildings: Will We Ever Go Back?” with John Scheurer
The Bill Walton Show
"Commuting to office work is obsolete. It is now infinitely easier, cheaper, and faster to do what the 19th century could not do, move information, and with it office work to where the people are, the tools to do so are already here. The telephone two-way video, electronic mail, the fax machine, the personal computer, and so on." Peter Drucker (1989) In 2020, over 30 years later, futurist and management guru Peter Drucker’s prediction came true with a bang. With the mandated COVID lockdowns, suddenly everybody had to learn to work from home. Office occupancy plummeted from 90% to 10%...
info_outline"Commuting to office work is obsolete. It is now infinitely easier, cheaper, and faster to do what the 19th century could not do, move information, and with it office work to where the people are, the tools to do so are already here. The telephone two-way video, electronic mail, the fax machine, the personal computer, and so on."
Peter Drucker (1989)
In 2020, over 30 years later, futurist and management guru Peter Drucker’s prediction came true with a bang. With the mandated COVID lockdowns, suddenly everybody had to learn to work from home. Office occupancy plummeted from 90% to 10% and we all learned about how to Zoom. Since then people are going back to the office, but occupancy still averages only 40 to 50% depending on the market, and in New York lower.
So what’s going to happen next? In this episode, I talk with commercial real estate expert extraordinaire John Scheurer about the prospects for office work and office buildings. John heads the real estate investing arm of Siguler Guff and was formerly CEO of Allied Capital after leading its very successful commercial real estate business.
“What COVID forced us to do is cram 50 years’ worth of commuting to the office to working wherever you wanted to work into two years” explains John.
One big beneficiary of the office exodus has been residential housing prices, which rose in some markets up to 50% fueled by people wanting to get bigger houses so they can have a home office.
With people not wanting to return to the office, demand for office leases has collapsed from 250 million square feet of office space signed for in 2019 to about 50 million in 2022.
Microsoft is reportedly giving up office in Seattle - a million square feet of space - and Reebok and hundreds of big companies have concluded to dramatically cut back as well. Allstate is getting rid of their suburban Chicago campus, because 75% of their people are now working remotely.
So this is an interesting story about how businesses and markets adapt to changing fortunes. Will empty office buildings be converted to condos? Will tech workers be lured back to work with promises of private offices? Did businesses need all those employees to begin with?
After all, Elon Musk fired 80% of Twitter’s so-called workers and its seems to be operating just fine.
One of the fascinating aspects of this story is how entrepreneurs take advantage of distressed markets and can turn despair into opportunity. With the prices of office buildings falling, is this actually a good time to invest?
John and I also talk about what’s happening to hotel and retail properties, and where the future is not as bleak as it looked just a couple of years ago.
I asked John where he would invest today and his answers were intriguing.