Heavens and the tax authorities know that the office market has been tough. Just within the last few weeks, Goldman Sachs said that work-from-home will continue to push office vacancy rates upwards; on the whole, sales of office properties in metros are down year-over-year in the first half of 2023; and office skyscraper vacancy rates are on the rise.

But in all this, "there is a glimmer of hope in the news surrounding office properties," according to Trepp.

One of the news points is that companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta are pushing on a return to the office, "signaling a shift in their approach to remote work," as Trepp's Vivek Denkanikotte wrote. These major companies are moving to a three-day-a-week in-office requirement, and they will need to keep space for this. For data on Amazon and Google properties with outstanding loan balances, Trepp shows respective weighted average debt service coverage ratios to be 2.30 and 2.11, showing significant strength and the potential, though not the guarantee, that refinancing the loans — between the two, $2.70 billion in loans maturing by the end of 2024 — might have an easier time refinancing than what has been seen of late.