As in, how do houses and corporate buildings become abandoned? Were certain buildings never listed for sale? Or were they, but just never sold? How does something as big as an entire mall become abandoned?
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Property becomes abandoned when it becomes unusable through disaster or neglect but the owner can’t or won’t do anything about it so it just sits there. Most places have policies and laws in place to make it difficult for abandoned property to become commonplace because it attracts all kinds of problems, but you’ll still get properties that slip through the cracks.
Related fact: the apartment building I live in has an adjacent lot that used to be occupied by a small house that had been abandoned. I don’t know how it ended up abandoned, I just know that it had been declared uninhabitable by the city and boarded up. The guy who owns my apartment building bought the property the house was on thinking he would demolish and build another apartment building but after the sale was closed, the city told him they wouldn’t give him a permit for the new building unless it had underground parking because the street parking in the neighborhood was already at capacity. So he demolished the house and planted grass. Now there’s a big grassy field right outside and just by getting rid of the boarded up house, the value of my apartment building (or, more specifically, the land it’s on) tripled. Don’t feel bad for my landlord. He came out pretty good in that deal.
Buildings have to be maintained. All it takes for a building to be destroyed is to be left with a leaky roof or pipe for a little too long and before you know it, the cost of repairs can ruin some people. You can’t afford the repairs and you know you’re going to lose a ton of money on the resale value by trying to sell a run down house, so you opt instead to do nothing. Nobody else is using the house so squatters move in. They wreck even more stuff, so you have to board the place up to try to keep them out, and now the building is an eyesore and worth even less. It’s a downward spiral, and when people are faced with lose-lose situations, sometimes all they can do is walk away.
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