And online.
Bricks and mortar retail is stuggling. The US has something like 3X the per capita retail square footage as the next country.
A lot of that isn't going to get repurposed into Tractor Supply stores and indoor go-kart tracks and somebody's holding the loans on it. Even if one of the companies like Hobby Lobby that looks for distressed places does happen to go in it'll be at .50 on the dollar or less.
That was actually one of the scariest but mostly undiscussed things about the financial crisis. For about 6 months darn near every suburban burger shack and strip mall was worth approximately 0 marked to market, making nearly every single bank, big and small, technically insolvent.
The recovery, such as it was, began when the regulators agreed to permit banks to maintain the previous values on their books and in some cases the properties have recovered most or all of it.
This is a much slower moving problem but still a problem. If banks take losses in the CRE sector they're also going to be extending less credit to anything new.
