Commercial Real Estate: Macro Risk or Investment Opportunity?

The most common scavenger bird in the western United States is the turkey vulture, more commonly called the turkey buzzard.  It is a marvel of evolution, with keen eyesight and an extraordinary sense of smell, allowing it to locate the recently deceased from miles away.  Ungainly as it takes off with furious flapping, once in the air it is a majestic creature, soaring thousands of feet upwards on air thermals, with an out-spread V-shaped wing span of up to six feet.  As it circles from a height, it surveys the landscape below and then plunges to feast on the remains of less fortunate creatures.

I don’t believe in reincarnation but, if I did, I would have to say the best real estate investors were probably turkey buzzards in a previous life.  And never more so than today, when the real estate landscape is littered with the victims of the seismic changes wrought by the pandemic and a sudden return to normal interest rates, following 15 years of super-easy money.