After two years of pandemic uncertainty, many questions around the return to office and its impact on commercial real estate have yet to be answered. But as migration patterns from high-cost markets to the Sun Belt have entrenched alongside attitudes around remote work, familiar, ominous music is playing for owners of older office buildings in Chicago and New York City. In the last two weeks, owners of Class-B office properties in both cities have handed the keys to their buildings over to their lenders, much as owners of Class-B malls have elected to do in recent years. “Office in what you’ll call the northern, the colder climates, the high-tax [cities] — that feels like the new retail, right?” Origin Investments co-CEO Michael Episcope told Bisnow. "Where retail was 15 years ago and its slow demise." 
Within a year of the pandemic's U.S. arrival, Simon Property Group, the country’s largest mall owner, relinquished four malls to lenders. It followed that up by handing back the keys to an Atlanta-area mall in February 2021, about a month after…  Read the full story here. | 
