Basically, the company had to pay for its own buyout when private equity firms KKL, Vornado, and Bain bought the company for $6.6 billion, mostly with loans.
Because the company then had to pay off those extreme loans, they were forced to sell off their assets and property, which they leased back from the very private equity firms that now owned them.
The same thing happened more recently with Red Lobster and JoAnn Fabrics.
If you’re a business owning a building, maintenance is another thing you have to take care of as well as the business. If you’re not equipped to maintain the building or pay people to do it, then it might be better to rent and have the landlord take care of that stuff.
My union is selling our building because it wasn’t really anybody’s job to keep up on maintenance for the last 30 years. Now people that care are in there and they got estimates and whatnot, and it came to like a $600,000 bill to get it all caught up.
So we’re partnering with a local non-profit and moving our office in to their space with meeting rooms and whatnot that we can share. We have one meeting a month and training sessions already happen elsewhere. All of work is done away from the building aside from 3 people in the office full time, so it makes sense in our situation.
Yeah this makes sense, basically the downsizing I was talking about. Though I was thinking about an org with many branches, rather than underutilized office space.