> but some of that is intrinsic in what real estate is. You can go inside your house and it keeps the rain out, which is nice.

yeah and that remains true when real estate is exchanged for the amount of cash people have on hand, instead of how much cash they could theoretically produce in 30 years.

the game is trying to figure out how much of that intrinsic value is relevant right now, or how close is the current price to that 'intrinsic value' since they can be far far far away from each other. its just a commodity no matter how married you are to the asset class: if there is a glut of supply because people can't afford the mortgages or property taxes then prices go down. The banks and states don't care, they already earned what they wanted from the mortgage/property owner and are derisked. when you default they will get the property off their book as fast as possible.

>and if someone can turn a hotel into apartments successfully, which sounds like a challenge to me

It can be done, but I've more often seen apartments built over ground scraped clean than retrofitting an existing building. Honestly, hotels are probably the closest kind of building design that one could get that might be worth converting into apartments.

There are two buildings near downtown in my city. One was converted into studios, the other now bills itself as "student housing".

More directly with commercial real estate, WeWork is almost certainly going belly up after Softbank pulled out of its bailout. It's the largest office space lessee in New York and I would imagine in most other US real estate markets as well; its implosion will not look pretty.

And combine that with the fact that, even the overall economy aside, at least certain types of companies will slow real estate growth. I certainly don't believe that lots of companies are going to go fully remote. But I do think, based on talking to people, that at least some level of WFH is becoming normed. And one result (depending upon what floor plan changes companies make) is that there may be fewer dedicated desk/offices.

many hotel operators have long divested out of that underlying risk. most large hotel chains own less than 30% of the real estate they operate out of. it's the smaller operators that will have a hard time.