‘Hurricane has landed:’ Activist investor Jonathan Litt doubles down on workplace house brief

A serious activist investor is betting stalled return-to-office plans will fire up extra bother in business actual property.

Land and Buildings’ Jonathan Litt has been shorting REITs with excessive workplace house publicity for 3 years, and he has no plans to shift gears.

“In case you have no hire development and your vacancies are going up and you’ve got big working bills to run an workplace constructing, you are going backwards quick,” the agency’s chief funding officer informed CNBC’s “Quick Cash” on Tuesday.

Litt first warned Wall Avenue an “existential hurricane” was about to hit the sector in Could 2020. Now, he is saying the “hurricane has landed.”

He is doubling down on the decision — citing spiking rates of interest and excessive inflation. Litt calls them two elements he did not anticipate when he first began shorting these firms in Could 2020.

DC-based JBG Smith Properties is one in every of Litt’s main shorts. It is down 58% because the World Well being Group declared Covid-19 as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Up to now this yr, JBG Smith is off 20%.

“Washington, DC is likely one of the hardest markets within the nation at present,” famous Litt. “They’ve a considerable workplace portfolio.”

He provides the crackdown on lending is compounding the issues.

“This is not a do business from home story anymore. It is a financing story. It is sort of like them mall enterprise went from the mall drawback to the financing drawback,” Litt stated. “Now, it is a financing drawback. And as these money owed come due, there’s actually nowhere to go as a result of lenders aren’t lending to the house.”

JBG Smith didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

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