Commuter hell may toast real estate investors

COMMUTERS coming into New York City from the north, south, east and west are irate.

The Long Island Railroad, New Jersey Transit, Amtrak and Metro North — not to mention the New York City subway, which moves 5.7 million people every weekday — have all been plagued by dramatic breakdowns and crashes over the past few months.

And as angry as all those commuters are, there is another group of people who should be even more livid — only they don’t know it yet.

That group consists of real estate developers and New York City building owners. And I will give you my prediction of what will happen if the commuting nightmare isn’t straightened out very soon.

As I type this column on Wednesday afternoon, there are 387 new buildings under construction in Manhattan. According to the New York City Department of Buildings, that will add 95.7 million square feet of new space to Manhattan’s already massive real estate inventory.

When you include construction in the Bronx (380 buildings), Brooklyn (1,625 buildings), Queens (1,251 buildings) and Staten Island (713 buildings), the city as a whole will add 225.6 million square feet of new space.

So how is this real estate boom connected with the problems commuters are having? Easy: The attractiveness of telecommuting is going to increase.

Telecommuting is one way to alleviate the mass transit disaster now affecting the Greater New York area — and has been promoted recently by MTA Executive Director Ronnie Hakim, who suggested to employers that they allow workers to come into the office during off-peak hours to make a “long, hot summer” a bit more bearable.

And the problem for all those people who own commercial properties or are building new structures is that the idea of telecommuting makes a whole lot of sense with technology being as advanced today as it is.

Full disclosure: I work at home as often as I can. And there is no loss of productivity. In fact, I get more done when I work in my office at home than I do in a newsroom. And I’m not the only one at The Post who telecommutes.

The cost of renting office space in Manhattan is already falling, although years of double-digit gains have made space here among the most expensive in the world.

Anecdotal evidence is that businesses are being offered nice incentives from landlords to sign long-term leases. And rents may get even more squishy when that additional 95.7 million square feet of space hits the market .

The Buildings Department couldn’t give me details on how much of the construction is commercial, retail or residential. So there’s no way of knowing how much new office space there will soon be.

But considering that most of the buildings going up at the massive Hudson Yards project — the biggest in the city — on the far west side of Manhattan are designated for office space, that’s going to be the market affected the most.

There are probably bosses reading this column who are thinking: What if I let 10 percent of my staff work from home? Or what if I let my staff work from home 10 percent of the time?

Even a 1 percent increase in telecommuting might make real estate developers say ouch.

And smart bosses may even figure that employees would be willing to accept lower pay for the conve- nience of telecommuting.

So, here’s what I think: The people who are paying for all those fancy new buildings might want to “encourage” city and state officials to fix the transit problems sooner than soon.

If telecommuting becomes the bona fide trend in Manhattan, there are going to be empty buildings and unhappy investors.

The Federal Reserve doesn’t have a nifty phrase for skyrocketing stock prices — like when former Fed chief Alan Greenspan said back in the 1990s that people were “irrationally exuberant” — but it’s clear that central bank brass are getting worried enough about the marts that they are starting to express their concern out loud.

New York Fed boss William Dudley and Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer are the latest to express worries. As I’ve said before, one off the reasons the Fed is raising interest rates is to calm the market down.

Wall Street, however, continues to give a clear “up yours” to the Fed. Stock prices rose sharply on Wednesday, with the Dow Jones industrial average closing at 21,454.61, up 143.95.

What could have caused such irrational exuberance? We are near the end of the second quarter, and money managers need to make their performance look better than it actually has been. Listen to the Fed. President Trump seems to be confirming something I wrote a couple of weeks ago — the White House may be bugged. When Trump finally admitted recently that he doesn’t have tapes of his conversations with former FBI Director James Comey, the president also hinted that the US intelligence and law enforcement officials might have his office bugged. I mentioned in a column recently that a source who has been very reliable told me that intelligence services had obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (the FISA court) to listen in on the conversations of journalists who have been getting leaks from inside the White House. So Trump may not be too far off on this one, although journalists were amused that this might be nothing more than another conspiracy theory. Don’t count on that.