Real-estate investors face gloom as world CFOs prepare to downsize offices

Property investors are about to discover just how much the global fallout from the coronavirus pandemic has spread from deserted and cast-off buildings to their bottom lines.
 

Hundreds of corporate executives tracked in earnings calls around the world in the past five months addressed the urgency to cut real-estate costs, according to an AI model trained by Bloomberg to scour transcripts. Tactics include cutting office space, accelerating branch closures, renegotiating rents on warehouses and even shutting data centers.

In 4,767 global earnings calls between July 21 and Dec. 8, about one in eight machine-generated transcripts revealed that firms were rethinking their