I’m the one who started the thread.
There were many reasons posited, some that I remember that made sense (I work in finance, but not real estate finance)
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accounting rules that only approximate reality. e.g. you can carry a building in the books at $10M if you believe you can rent it for $1M a year. But if you rent it for $500k/year, you’ve got to write it down to $5M and take a $5M loss right away. The fact that you actually rented it for $500k destroys your presumption that the fair market rent is $1M.
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it costs a significant amount to “fit up” the property. In the example above it may take $1M in customization to rent it for twenty years. You’d rather wait a year or two hoping the rent will recover to $1M per year, rather than locking in the lower $500k per year for twenty years.