alt Hacker News> Keeping it vacant only impact current income, lowering rent impacts future forecasts.
Does it though? Suppose you can't find a tenant right now because the market is soft but is predicted to improve in a few years. If you leave the unit vacant, you lose money right now. If you rent it out with e.g. a 3-year lease, you make more for the next 3 years than you would with a vacancy, and if the market price has increased by then you can increase the rent on the unit and either get it from the current occupant or the one you get to replace them in the high demand market when the higher rent causes the low-paying tenant to not renew the lease.
So taking a tenant now only improves prospects (you fill a current vacancy) with no negative impact on future returns. The only thing it does is imply that current rents are lower than before and future rents might be too, but a vacancy implies that even more strongly.
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Humans are not Pareto efficient.
If my wife and I are at the airport, and the gate agent offers me (and only me) an upgrade on the flight, your logic says I should take it since that's strictly better than both of us flying economy.
How you think about it is different to how the multiple different players think about it.
If you’re levered up to the eyeballs you don’t want your bank reviewing your file.
> Does it though? Suppose you can't find a tenant right now because the market is soft but is predicted to improve in a few years.
You'd need perfect information to make a contractual decision on that, and it still has lasting effects.
For instance imagine renting your floors to Pornhub for these 3 years on the cheap because the market it low. Assuming you made the right calculation and demand recovers 3 years later, you'll have to first kick out the company (= months spent restoring it), then try to convince the insurance company that eyes at your building that they should pay a hiked price to move into Pornhub's previous floors.
And that's assuming you haven't completely blown it where the market actually recovers within 6 months for reasons nobody anticipated.