Tesla and Real Estate?
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Wonder if a Tesla REIT could be in the future?
I have no idea what a REIT is, but Real Estate is a basic function of any large footprint company. Of course they make it part of their corpus, their life body blood and soul, as it were. If they don't, they practically don't exist.
Now, looking up REIT: Ok, I see that as a way to turn real estate into a publicly tradable item. I'd be concerned what the risks are to the underlying functions of that land. One of the main benefits of being an owner is that you control it. The value to Tesla of controlling their factory is immense; they are attacked literally on almost all sides by those who wish to muck up their works, so, more than anyone, or as much as anyone who needs to avoid outsider attacks, Tesla needs to control its own stuff. If there's even a hint that the land under their very own factory could become at risk because of outside control, then that would jeopardize and cost the factory, and therefore, their entire product lineup. That is entirely unacceptable to a vertically integrated new product type market creating company like Tesla while they don't have complete redundancy at every level, and even if they do arbitrage such jeopardy by having redundancy, they can't even over-risk their redundancy itself. I don't even want to read more about what a REIT is without knowing more about their general history, and I assume that what I would learn would be overly opposed to the principles of Tesla itself.
Having said all that, I think and assume from the very general inputs I've seen so far, that any and all Real Estate considerations that allow Tesla to perform its goals without interference should be and probably are already considered. I know this sounds like a boring conclusion, but it really isn't in my opinion, but here it is: without looking into it and just getting a "general sense" of what I've read so far from Tesla and other companies, I assume Tesla probably is close to doing the right things with Real Estate, and that mucking it up by trying out dangerous Real Estate functions would not be good.
Specifics of what Tesla is doing with Real Estate, on the other hand, would go beyond my particular knowledge level (to varying degrees). I'd be fascinated to know some of it, and kind of mildly interested in the rest.
For instance, we learned that Tesla is doing some sort of landlord-tenant thing with their Nevada and soon New York factories to Panasonic. Probably, the idea was infectious: Panasonic, Tesla employees, etc., probably all said "hey that's how everyone does it", and indeed, I've run into the same factory-as-hotel concept at Intel in Santa Clara, and I assume it's endemic. I also think that by now, that is a worked out system, and once they trust all the parties (in the more specific case of Tesla-Panasonic, at least), the real estate portions of the agreements aren't any more risky than the agreements they made to perform work, which are, of course, all about doing stuff, so the real estate stuff is basically just a subordinate consideration (terms of which could easily be made appropriate to the main) to the goals of the agreement, so that type of real estate deal seems just fine to me. I'm sure there are those in this field who would, with decades under their belt, complain that I have an incorrect "beginner's view" of the topic, making "beginner's" mistakes, but whatever, since the idea is that they probably have a pretty good track record doing this type of real estate deal.
It's kind of like going up to a family's house, and saying "Hey, can you give me your house? I'll play with its ownership! Lots of money will be involved, and other people will have control of what used to be your land!" Although, it's even worse with a factory: instead of risking one family's homelessness and life savings, you're risking an entire planet and species, in the case of Tesla, as well as the livelihoods of multiple families. The family might get enough money out of the REIT to walk away and get a tent to camp in, at least, but a whole factory? Forget about it. Way too much integrated into that thing for it to be worth the risk.
How many large profitable chain stores have you seen close because they refused to succeed, and the main part of that is that they sold their land and the landlords raised their rent? Practically all of them here in Silicon Valley. Probably, they had a benefit to failing, for whatever reason --- their owners probably had bought a lot of Put options in the stock market against their own companies. But, they were only selling commodity goods. Tesla isn't some damn commodity, yet. (We can only dream that one day it will be, but that's at least a quarter century away, if not longer.) For now, the risk is too great for those shenanigans.
