Do they actually "own" it? I work for a large company who spent millions building a new office and then immediately sold it to a different company so they could lease it instead of owning it (apparently this looks better on the books!)

Amazon used to lease several buildings from Paul Allen for years but ended up buying them outright, and then going on a construction binge beyond that.

>apparently this looks better on the books!

Or, as we have seen hundreds of times, it's sold at market price to a "third party" company that is actually owned by one of the board members or executives, which then rent it back to the company for a slight premium.

We do see this occasionally. You'll have some private equity group buy a restaurant chain like Red Lobster. They make RL lease the real estate from them after having RL sell the real estate to them. Sometimes it's not restaurants, I think this is what murdered Toys'R'Us (correct me on that if I'm wrong).

But this isn't the norm, and it's not happening to well-managed businesses. It's something a vulture does after the company has been struggling for years. If that happened with a Microsoft or an Amazon, or any of the companies we work for. It's silly to suggest that is the cause of widespread RTO mandates.