WeWork landlords in America are likely to learn: In a down
market, they’re all going to be partners, voluntarily or otherwise
With
major announcements almost daily, WeWork is stealing so many headlines it’s
annoying the president. The latest is its name-change to WeCompany, the old
name being simply too restrictive for a company bent on global domination.
Among its new divisions are WeLive, WeGrow and even WeBank is on the horizon.
Its
other big news was related to SoftBank’s decision to pull back on the $16
billion dollar equity commitment to the company, reducing it to a mere $2
billion. Whether this was a belated reevaluation of the wee company’s prospects
or a reflection of SoftBank’s own issues (its stock has declined 28 percent in
value since October) is a matter of debate.
Lost
among these headlines are a couple interesting notes about the company. First,
the bonds it issued last spring with interest at 7.87% are now yielding 10.4%.
Whatever SoftBank’s reason for re-trading its commitment, the bond market has
consigned the company’s paper to the junk pile.
More
interesting than its bond status, however, is what WeWork is doing today in
Asia. Its pivot there might prove the company’s future, if not its salvation.
WeWork has announced a series of joint ventures with major Chinese
developers—most recently, Gemdale Properties, the giant state-owned real estate
company—where, rather than simply leasing space from these developers (and
taking 100% of the upside and assuming 100% of the risk), it is signing
“participating leases” with them.
The
details are sketchy, but the idea is simple: The building owner puts up the
money for the tenant improvements, lowers WeWork’s base rent and then shares in
the subleasing profits. In other words, WeWork is swapping profits for downside
protection, not a bad idea in a rising market and a brilliant one in a falling
market. And, according to WeWork, office rents are falling in all but two of
its global markets.
Why
would the Chinese do this? They’re smart guys. Why not insist upon the
traditional landlord/tenant approach and force the tenant to take all of the
risk?
One,
they need WeWork far more than it needs them, since the company can go
anywhere. The Chinese companies may be top-notch at “borrowing” technology and
knocking off brands, but they suck at cool. And WeWork is cool; it has
dazzlingly pulled off its brand. If co-working were just a matter of Beats,
beanbag chairs and free beer, every frat in America would be banking money.
The
other reason, back to them being smart guys, is that they must understand what
WeWork landlords in America are likely to learn: In a down market, they’re all
going to be partners, voluntarily or otherwise. Self-described big wave surfer
Neumann has already announced he will ride the market down by rewriting the
company’s unprofitable leases, lowering rents to profitability or abandoning
the buildings.
The
clever Chinese know that WeWork neither signs nor guarantees its own leases.
Rather, for each lease it signs, it creates a single purpose entity (SPE) with
limited capitalization; i.e. its leases carry almost no financial exposure to
the parent company. This means that if a landlord refuses to sign a lease
amendment giving away, say, 80% of her rent, Neumann can toss that particular SPE
into bankruptcy and paddle off in search of the next big set. If we were on
Gemdale’s board of directors, we might conclude that taking half of the upside
isn’t such a bad move, since we’re going to be stuck with the losses anyway.
If
WeWork truly wants to shelter itself from the coming winter storm — maybe not,
they produce the biggest waves — the next step in its evolution from risk taker
to guaranteed profitability could be the hotel model. Successful hotel
companies create a strong brand and then, to over-simplify matters a bit,
either sell franchises (the Motel 6 approach) or sign no-risk management
contracts with owners of swanky hotel buildings (the Four Seasons approach).
Four
Seasons and its competitors are paid a minimum fee regardless of the occupancy
rate or gross income they produce for their owners. And they are paid big fees
if all goes well. It isn’t impossible to lose money in the hotel management
business, but it’s harder than in many other endeavors.
WeWork
could do the same thing, it could become the Four Seasons of office buildings.
It has the coolest brand, it fills a need that it helped create and, as far as
we can tell, its niche — short-term, micro-size office rentals in traditional
long-term, big-space locations — is here to stay. Like the Chinese, the
WeWorkers are clever guys, they’ve thought of this long ago.
The
point of this essay, dear reader, is not to bury WeWork, but to praise it for
rationally pivoting its business in the face of economic climate change to
minimize risk. Something we all might consider.
Is
China’s Debt Crackdown Hitting California’s Commercial Real Estate Bubble?
Oceanwide Plaza – a three-tower condominium, hotel, and retail
complex expected to cost over $1 billion – is one of the largest real estate
projects in downtown Los Angeles. It was scheduled to be completed in 2019. The
owner and developer, Oceanwide Holdings, is a Chinese conglomerate that is also
currently building one of the largest mixed-use projects in San Francisco, the
$1.6 billion Oceanwide Center. But now it seems the funds have run out.
“In an effort to prioritize construction activity, and while we
restructure capital for the project, interior construction at Oceanwide Plaza
is temporarily on hold,” Oceanwide Holdings said in a statement, cited by
the Los Angeles Times.
“Our decision to provisionally pause construction is solely based
on these internal factors and nothing else,” the statement said. With “more
than $1 billion of equity already invested in Oceanwide Plaza, we look forward
to investing more capital into the property and together, with Lendlease,
remain committed to building this landmark project for LA.”
The statement said that construction will resume in mid-February,
and that it will be completed next year.
This comes at a time when the Chinese government is cracking down
on capital flows from China to other countries, particularly to fund real
estate projects, and when it is also cracking down on the ballooning debt of
Chinese conglomerates, after a reckless binge of buying up everything in sight.
HNA, Anbang, and other conglomerates are now being forced to unload these toys.
In HNA’s case, this includes the $305 million deal to sell
a building in Manhattan a year ago. And it has put numerous other recent
acquisitions on the market.
Anbang Insurance Group, which had purchased the Waldorf Astoria in
New York for nearly $2 billion in 2014 and which in 2016 handed Blackstone
Group $5.5 billion for a portfolio of 15 hotel properties, collapsed and has
been taken over by Chinese regulators, and its founder was sent to prison. Now
these investments are up for sale.
Dalian Wanda – which also acquired the move theater chain AMC for
$2.6 billion and Legendary Entertainment – has also been unloading its
properties in the US, including One Beverly Hills, for an undisclosed amount
that the Wall Street Journal disclosed was over
$420 million.
So a work-stoppage by a Chinese property developer due to funding
is rattling some nerves in California.
“They said they were stopping work on the project at this time,
and had no further explanation,” the general manager of the LA Department of
Building and Safety, Frank Bush, told the Los Angeles Times. He said that Lendlease,
the general contractor on the project, called his agency on Friday to cancel an
inspection scheduled for that day.
There are some other potential wrinkles.
The FBI is also probing Oceanwide Plaza and other Los Angeles
downtown projects with foreign investors, according to the Times, “as they seek
evidence of possible crimes including bribery, extortion, money laundering and
kickbacks that could involve L.A. city officials and development executives.”
The Times adds:
No one has been arrested or charged in the probe, and the federal
warrant [filed in 2018] did not say that agents had gathered evidence of
criminal activity by the individuals or companies named in the document.
Oceanwide has refused to confirm or deny if it has received a
federal subpoena. But in the statement concerning the construction halt, it
told the L.A. Times that
because the federal investigation was ongoing, “Oceanwide has no comment
regarding any investigation-related matters.”
In 2016, investments from China in US commercial real estate
reached a record $19 billion, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s 2016 report, with the top three targets
being Manhattan, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles. About two-thirds
of this money went into trophy deals with a price tag of over $1 billion.
Chinese money is “transforming LA’s skyline, revitalizing
neighborhoods, and inspiring additional investment,” the report gushed,
concerning several high-end developments in LA Downtown, including the
Oceanwide Plaza.
In 2017, that flow of capital from China into US commercial real
estate began to fizzle, with an estimated in $7.3 billion flowing into
commercial real estate, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s 2017 report last
March.
We can’t wait to see the 2018 numbers because the flow has reversed,
with Chinese investors trying to get out from under the properties and their
associated debts.
Among the other large Chinese projects in L.A. is the Metropolis,
a four-tower $1-billion condo and hotel project that is expected to be finished
by the end of 2019. The three residential towers are already partially
occupied. Whew!
Real-estate folks in California are now nervously eying all
China-backed unfinished mega-developments in the state, as authorities in China
are struggling to keep their debt-bubble from unwinding in a disorderly manner.
The fact the Chinese investors have become net seller is so not cool.
In San Francisco, folks fret over the $1.6 billion Oceanwide
Center project. One of its two towers, when complete, will be the City’s second
tallest. The project is across the street from Millennium Tower, the infamous Leaning Tower of
San Francisco,
which thankfully was built by American developers, or else the hullaballoo
would be global instead of local. Oceanwide Center is scheduled for completion
in 2021, assuming, to nervously channel some prime Elon Musk, that funding is
secured.
Is the End of the U.S.
Dollar Nearing? Here Are Few Reasons Why That Might Happen
Confidence in the U.S. Dollar
Seems to Be Dwindling
The end of the U.S. dollar could be nearing…
This may certainly sound like an overly dire warning, but it is
true. Know that this is not just a gut feeling. This argument is backed by a
lot of data and developments.
Before
going into any details, we have to ask, why is the U.S. dollar so well
recognized?
You
see, this is because the U.S. dollar is used for global trade and payments, and
central banks hold it in their reserves. There’s confidence in the U.S. dollar.
Now,
the big question: What do you think will happen if, all of a sudden, major
countries around the globe decide to question the way the U.S. dollar is
used? It could have detrimental effects on the greenback.
That is
what’s happening these days. The value of the U.S. dollar is being
questioned.
Look at
Russia.
The
country’s Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, said that the U.S. actions are
incentivizing de-dollarization:
This is probably the
paradox of the current situation. And the paradox is that the idea of
de-dollarization receives constant incentives from the issuer itself…Obviously,
the trend to reduce dependence of national economies on the dollar will only
increase. Economic actions such as sanctions and protectionism of the most
powerful player in the economic arena only increase tensions.
Russia is also focused on non-dollar denominated trade.
Over the past few years, the country has built a strong
relationship with China and is trading with China using the yuan. Russia has
even bought the Chinese yuan for its reserves.
Why should you care? Russia is the 12th biggest country in
the world and China is the second-biggest hub in the global economy. If these
countries are ditching the U.S. dollar for trading, don’t you think other
countries will follow?
Central Banks’ Yuan Reserves
Increase by 78%
Mind you, we are seeing an emergence of the Chinese yuan as
a currency that a lot of central banks and countries are leaning toward.
Look at central banks, for example. They are increasing their
Chinese yuan reserves. At the end of the third quarter of 2018, they had
$192.54 billion worth of Chinese yuan in their reserves. In the same period a
year ago, this figure was $108.16 billion.
So, over a one-year period, their reserves increased by
78%!
Dear
reader, know that the only thing keeping the U.S. dollar up is the confidence
among governments, central banks, businesses, and investors that it has some
value. There’s really nothing else beyond that.
The day
this confidence breaks, you can say goodbye to the greenback. The examples
above show that there are cracks in the confidence. And know that these are not
the only developments that show a loss of confidence in the U.S. dollar.
I am
watching the U.S. dollar closely. If you follow this publication closely, you
will know I don’t believe in the “outright collapse” thesis for the dollar. I
believe we are going to see gradual declines in the value of the dollar at
first, and then we are going to see selling escalate once it fails to stay
strong.
If you
hold the U.S. dollar, I’d be very careful in the coming years.
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