After COVID, office space demand flipped: huge towers sit empty while small businesses can't find 2,000-10,000 sq ft spaces. Companies like Rackspace are moving to suburbs closer to where workers live, and some are buying vacant offices to build employee housing, like Collins Aviation did in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
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And it's very hard. There's a lot of big empty office spaces. Yeah, but there's not a lot of small empty office space like 2,000, 3,000 square feet. You can't even find that. If I wanted to go rent 10,000 square feet, I could go get a great deal on 10,000 square feet. But I don't have the need for 10,000 square feet. But I'm saying to go to— if you want to have a small business and have an office, it's very hard today because you can't go find something.
That's why most people are operating right out of their house, right? That's what I'm saying.
Garages into to their office. That's what I'm saying, they're being forced to do that because of the, because, you know, these people that own the, I was reading a story where this company Rackspace bought a mall and now they're going to move out of the mall because when COVID came, their employees all wanted to go work at home. And then they, a lot of them relocated outside of the city, wherever they are in Texas. So now they're going to move everything out of that building to a smaller building outside of the city where more of their employees live so that they can have an office closer to where the employees move to. 'Cause a lot of employees moved out of the city into the suburbs.
Yeah, that's like the one investment group that's literally building, trying to build a city outside of San Francisco.
Right. There's like 3 or 4, there's 3 or 4 projects that are trying to get done in California where company went and bought property and they want to put up an office building. City and house. No, they want to build an office building.
They want to build a city, right? They want to build their own city, and it's going to be for their employees, the people. Like, because, I mean, I understand, you know, trying to get a house, you can't afford that in San Francisco, Oakland, wherever, you know, right?
So they want to make it affordable for their employees.
Yeah, it's smart. I think that's gonna pop up all over the country.
And, you know, like where my daughter lives in Cedar Rapids, there's a couple of big companies there, smart cities. And doing the same kind of thing where they moved in. They bought up all this one company, Collins Aviation. They merged with another company. They bought up all the empty office space in the corridor. That's right where my daughter's TV station is. And they bought up all the buildings over there, and that's all their offices. And then all their employees move from other states into the area. And it's much cheaper to live in Iowa than it is to live in Florida or New York or Chicago or wherever all these people were living.
Yeah, no doubt.
More affordable living.
I mean, the younger generation is, you know, they're more, they're more mobile, right? Like they're not like me. I have small, not small, but I still have teenagers, so I can't just pick up and go, right?
No, but I'm saying if your job, like let's say I move the office, I said, oh, we're going to move to North Florida. Who wants to move? People might want to move because it's cheaper to live over there. And give people a better living opportunity. That's what's going on.
That's a possibility.
That's what's going on. Not a very large scale, it's going on. Yeah, but let's talk about like, you know, and also like they're talking about taking empty office buildings and renovating them into apartments. They're talking about taking these empty hotels and turning them into apartments because there's tons of them.
There's tons of empty businesses. Yeah, why don't you just let the homeless in?
They're doing that in some cases too.
They are doing it in some cities and it's working.
Yeah, in some cities they're taking care of other people and not taking care of the homeless. We won't get into a whole discussion about that.
