alt Hacker News>This isn't really accurate. It actually takes a decent amount of work and capital input to get a set of retail buildings into usable shape and keep them that way. The internet caricature of landlords is that the buildings just popped into existence one day and the landlords rent them out, but there's obviously more to it. I know several attempts at retail real estate development that flopped and lost investors a lot of money.
Nobody develops the sort of organic small scale anything anymore because the caricature informs the local government who then sink their teeth in at every turn and the end result is that the only people doing new development or refreshing stuff at great expense are corporations capable of fending off the government or rich enough to play along.
I think big players also have significant risk exposure during black swan events and the timeline of their operations makes those incidents not entirely unlikely to occur. It's sort of like insurance - most of the time they just get to extort rent, but sometimes they get crushed, too.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HPP/
Check the 5-year on Hudson Pacific. They're down 96% and dropping. They own a significant number of downtown commercial properties in SF and LA. They're completely underwater, their spaces are barely half full, and they can't lower rents without violating their bank loan covenants.
Of course, if the commercial landscape hadn't shifted in a way nobody could predict then, yes, they'd likely have continued to print money for the foreseeable future. Instead, they're left holding a very heavy bag and will take it to the grave.