What if half-empty Class-B office towers draw no bids at all?
Lenders finding zero bid for half-empty Class-B towers mark values to land-minus-demolition, crystallizing losses that hit regional-bank CRE books and HY/CMBS. Rhymes with 2009 office and the 2023-24 office repricing (Brookfield/Blackstone handing back keys; SF/Chicago towers selling at 70%+ discounts). Forward angle: Class-B is the structurally impaired tail of WFH — the loss is permanent, not cyclical; short CMBS BBB and regional banks with office concentration, not broad equities.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Lenders find no buyers for half-empty Class-B towers in Chicago and SF, marking values to land minus demolition cost. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Financial conditions ▲ · Recession signal ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.