Commercial Properties for Sale in Economic Meltdown

This unchartered economic meltdown has put a lot of commercial properties for sale in a lot of towns in a lot of countries.

I can only really talk about what I saw in Canada and what I have seen in three states of Australia and it makes me very worried and sad.

The other thing that makes me feel sorry for retailers today is when I walk past shops in shopping centres (Malls) that are fully stocked but there are no buying~or even browsing ~ customers in their stores. All that stock on the shelves ready for someone to buy; lights blazing brightly, air conditioning running full bore here in Australia to counteract the rising summer heat, and no customers to pay for any of it. No wonder those shop owners are looking stressed!

Small business employs a lot of people in Australia and I now notice that there are not a lot of full time staff in some of these shops that I see more regularly. It is the shop owners who are having to back up seven days straight every week to keep these shops open in accordance with their commercial leasing agreements. The question is:"How long can these shop owners keep up these conditions?"

Unless the stock on their shelves is on consignment, there is every chance a lot of small retailers are going to lose more than their shirts. Many of these businesses will have financed their enterprise with a mortgage loan against their homes; so when the time of debt default comes will they lose their homes too?

In which case, Australia could end up with not only a heap of commercial properties for sale but a fire sale on residential properties too. It's an extremely bad situation all around but especially for commercial properties because who would want to start a commercial enterprise when the economy is in such unchartered territory?

And it's not just in Australia. When I was in Canada earlier this year, we did a lot of travelling between British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. What I noticed in every town was a lot of commercial properties closed and empty along the strip Malls. These strip malls reminded me very much of our shops along our busier traffic areas in Australia that we just call "the shops" that are closing up too.

The real question about commercial properties for sale we should be asking today is this:

"If Australia and Canada who are considered to be surviving this economic crises better than many other countries, is seeing such a downturn in commercial properties in our local communities, how badly affected are some European and Asian Countries?"

BACK TO TOP