Commercial leases are usually 7 years. If they bought in during the go-go run in 2018-2019, they've still got years left. Breaking a commercial lease in good times is already very difficult (I was lucky to get out of one a year early in 2019 because I found someone to take it over that the landlord liked). And who would take over or sub the lease today? Everyone is trying to get out of their leases right now because office space is underutilized with WFH.
Also good point. However, while commercial spaces in general are (as you say) underutilized, my gut feel (non-empirical here) from being in large cities is that there is somewhat of a boon for hot-desking / blurred-work-life-balance "office leisure spaces".
Without having your experience of breaking a commercial lease, I would imagine one avenue to explore would be trying to offload some of these leases to emerging companies doing what I refer to above.
Sure they could offload them (commercial leases are usually transferrable/sublettable),but if you offload them for pennies on the dollar, that looks really bad on the balance sheet.
Better to keep them and tell your shareholders that this is a temporary blip, and profits will be coming any day now...
