Ecan6 - And again with the 1400 kingdom hall that need to be build or have major repairs.
That number may be ambiguous, however I think this has much more to do with what they are not telling you. The new hall design, (large commercial buildings), and the overall more regional approach to how circuits, and districts are divided, strongly implies that they may very well need 1400 "new" halls, but at the expense of several thousand smaller local ones they are going to sell down the road.
Again, I stress this is about capital project dollars. They are pushing for revenue, so they don't need to depend on the sale of properties in order to build first. They will sell later, but when they determine they can make the most money on the properties.
The long term objective is lower operating expenses, because they know their business model is not eternally sustainable. They have done nothing but cut, cut, cut for the last 25 years since moving to a "donation" arrangement. This caught up to them, so now they need to make big changes in how business is run, in order to sustain solvency long-term.
d4g