By Don Sweeney The Sacramento Bee    “They are not mostly fleeing to Texas, despite memes and advertisements touting it as an alternative to California. The top beneficiaries of Californians seeking their fortunes elsewhere are Nevada, Hawaii, Oregon, Arizona, Idaho and Washington, the study found. Other states benefiting from the California exodus include Colorado, Montana, Utah,…Read More→

“For the past four years, the city has been rolling out the red carpet for developers or building owners to convert underutilized historic office buildings: cutting fees, slicing red tape, relaxing zoning restrictions, and eliminating both affordable housing requirements and transfer taxes. The city has about 30 million square feet of vacant office space. Despite…Read More→

East Bay Times reporter George Avalos cited statistics from Cushman Wakefield that San Jose’s vacancy rate is 28.9%, improving from 30.9% during the first quarter, while Downtown Oakland’s office vacancy is at 37.2% and San Francisco at 34.8%…ouch ouch and ouch!  Meanwhile in San Ramon the Canyon Place, a four-building office complex is now slated…Read More→

  45 Fremont Street, San Francisco, a 620,000 square foot Class A office property owned by Shorenstein and Blackstone, goes back to market at direction of  lender Bank of America. With a loan value of $347 million this puts the debt at $560/SF, which pre-covid would make sense but in today’s office sale market with…Read More→

According to an article published January 22,  2024 in Biznow, office conversions to apartments has risen to over 55,000,”four times higher than the 12,100 conversions in 2021. Looking forward, about 147,000 apartments are on the way in future adaptive reuse projects’,  according to the RentCafe report. Washington D.C. is at the top, with 5,820 apartments, followed by New…Read More→

89% defaulted ($672 million) and 11.1% ($83.7 million) were paid off during September 2023. None were extended or modified, according to Moody’s Analytics.  A new company, Arthroto, has a plan to make conversion of office to residential easier and cheaper by using factory-manufactured components that can be assembled floor by floor without disrupting other floor…Read More→

If true this could be great news! A recent working report from New York University and Columbia University identified older office buildings that were physically suited for conversion from office to residential. “The papers authors…identified 140 office buildings across San Francisco for which residential conversion could make financial sense. San Francisco, the paper’s authors write,…Read More→

Austell Place, a 170,000 sf 100-year-old office building and was renovated in 2019 will now have 1,000 migrants living in the building. It had previously been converted from a 100-year old warehouse to a modern office building. It has floor-to-ceiling windows. I tried to find details of how this office-to-residential conversion will work but at…Read More→

There was an announcement today about a 41,000 square foot office building in San Rafael, California being turned into 41 studio apartments ‘for those formerly unhoused’. The same Bisnow report also mentioned that Tishman Speyer just secured $150 million in financing to turn a Washington D.C. shopping mall into multifamily. They will demolish the 1970’s…Read More→

It is hard to believe that during the past twelve months at one point the price of a share of First Republic Bank stock was $171!  Today it is $13/share!  Before the pandemic San Francisco office buildings were selling for $800-1,200/rsf and considered among the best investments in the world. From the SF Business Times…Read More→

SPUR and ULI San Francisco along with Gensler and HR&A Advisors did a study regarding the feasibility of converting office buildings to residential projects. “Because of their physical characteristics, office buildings in San Francisco are stronger candidates for conversion than office buildings in other cities in North America. For projects to be financially feasible, the value…Read More→

According to the Census Bureau data, for the year ending July 1, 2022, 343,000 California residents left the state. However, 106,000 births and 125,700 net international immigration  resulting in a net loss of 113,000. Meanwhile, Texas grew by 470,00, Florida by 416,000 and North Carolina by 133,000.  Of course, with our limited water supply and…Read More→

Between 2018 and 2021, 352 Corporate headquarters have left California. The three top relocation destinations were Texas, Tennesee and Nevada. The main reasons given for thir exodus include California’s high taxes, the cost of living, the heavy regulations and the legal environment. Of the 153 that left just last year, 80 dwere from Los Angeles,…Read More→

  As reported in the San Francisco Business Times October 18, 2022, “Layoffs and economic uncertainty notwithstanding, the Bay Area is expected to enjoy economic growth of 4.8% this year, fueled by what remains strong performance from the tech sector, according to new research from the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise. The report, 2022’s Fastest-Growing…Read More→

In the October 21, 2022 San Francisco Business Times article, 20 cities were mentioned that will pay folks to pack up and move to their city. Here are a few examples, and the incentives range from giving you a discount on buying a home there, unlimited golf membership, free use of co-working spaces, free fitness…Read More→

  The CIM Group out of Los Angeles had plans for a 1.1 million square foot office tower in downtown Oakland, but is now proposing a 487 foot tower to build 600 residential units. This would be the tallest building in Oakland. According to CoStar News, “While to pivot is a boost of momentum for…Read More→

TheRegistry published on Spt. 6. 2022 where in 2015 Northwestern Mutual paid $37.8 million for the 100 unit Arroyo Residences apartment complex in downtown Walnut Creek at 1250 Arroyo Way, and now Rockwood Capital just purchased this property for $66 million, $440,000 per unit. The property is a half-mile walk from Bart, walking distance to…Read More→

Colliers just released a bullet list for August of a few  of the very positive news clips out. Blackstone, one of the biggest commercial real estate investment companies in the world, just raised 24.1 billion for its latest real estate fund, ‘the largest fundraise on record’. “July’s job report marks the return of full-pre-pandemic employment…Read More→

  This has huge implications not just as a major office deal, but one that was signed while we are still struggling to get workers back into the office. Additionally this is a major signal to the world that despite high income taxes, high energy costs, high housing costs, a homeless problem the San Francisco…Read More→

I don’t see this as a new national trend to take care of two problems at once but in San Pablo, a city in Northern California a small two-story office building is being converted to 54 small apartments, In this region office vacancies went up fro almost 10% to 18%. “There’s  just a ton of…Read More→

Updater is a relocation app that helps Americans with various tasks that come up with a relocation, such as hooking up to Internet, getting your mail forwarded, updating your various records, etc. They track who is going where in the U.S.  From migration analysis of 300,000 moves, less folks are leaving San Francisco than in…Read More→

Bisnow reported today on a Stanford and Hoover Institution working paper titled ‘Why Working From Home Will Stick’ ‘that the amount of work undertaken from home in the U.S. will rise from about 5% before the pandemic to about 20% after the pandemic. They surveyed 30,000 U.S. workers multiple times and asked them to report…Read More→

The Bay Area Council surveyed 1,000 voters and 47% said they might leave the bay Area over the next few years. Of that group, 88% said they would leave California, The respondents citing high taxes, the high cost of living and housing costs doubled over the past few years. Texas, Arizona and New Mexico were…Read More→

  Even though some of you think California is losing all our major corporations and tons of our residents, and yes, we are letting a few out of this paradise of high taxes, high utilities,  and sometimes challenging politics, but the San Francisco Business Times reported on today’s Time Magazine 100 Most Influential Company list…Read More→

According to George Avalos, business reporter for the East Bay Times, “California’s job market should outpace the nation’s employment performance during 2021 – but remain two years away from climbing  back to the record job totals the state reached in early 2020” according to the UCLA Anderson Forecast just out. Also, the report cast doubt…Read More→

On the one hand you have Salesforce just announcing it was putting 225,000 sf of San Francisco office space on the sublease market (on top of the 8+ million square feet already on that market) as well as cancelling a 325,000 sf office lease near its Salesforce Tower that had yet to be built. Bad…Read More→

There have been a number of major tech and finance companies over the past nine months who have announced long-term stay-at-home policies, prompting thousands of employees to uproot their families, relocate to a much less expensive region, purchase a new home, and begin to enjoy life with less financial stress. Many companies have had detailed…Read More→

While this may not be the norm everywhere in the United States, here in San Francisco one day’s news release was another blow to not just the office market but much more significant in many ways. First, there was a SF Business Times article that Uber may be quietly shopping 300,000 square feet of its…Read More→

According to a recent report by CBRE, Silicon Valley will be one of the hottest markets, nationwide, for future office development. “The San Jose metro area, defined as Santa Clara County, is touted as the No. 1 market for future development of office space and is also seen as an excellent market for retail and…Read More→

I’ve been reading report after report documenting and predicting the dire budget strife due to the impact of the Pandemic on business closures, tax revenues severely decreased, and costs relating to vaccination, testing, school readiness during the Pandemic and other costly issues which have stressed government entities across the U.S. San Francisco, 400 million shortfall,…Read More→

Diana Olick wrote an article Feb. 4, 2021 citing the affordable housing stock now 96-99% occupied, while in some communities many hotels are sitting empty due to the pandemic, with 18% behind on their mortgages as of December 2020 as compared with only 2% the prior year. Developers are taking advantage of this, purchasing distressed…Read More→

In 2020 Austin, Texas saw a 5.8% year-over-year job growth, Boise Idaho enjoyed a 2.9% growth, Dallas 2.8%; Seattle 2.35; Denver 1.7% and Nashville 1.2%, which on the other side of this equation San Francisco and San Jose each lost 2.6% of their jobs in the finance, information and professional services catagories…I’ve heard stories of…Read More→

  Even though in many regions in the United States there is a flood of office sublease space and there are reports that Corporate America may be giving up 25% of all their office space, long-term, due to partial or total remote working, there are still tens of millions of feet of new office projects…Read More→

Last week Oracle placed three of their Peninsula office buildings on the for-sale market, after announcing a few weeks ago they were moving their headquarters to Texas. Now NetApp just announced they will sell their 702,200 square foot Sunnyvale office campus. They have not announced leaving California…yet.  I started researching all the links to states…Read More→

  In case you weren’t aware I have been writing and publishing a newsletter, Corporate Office Perspectives, for the past 43 years and it goes out to tens of thousands of subscribers every other month. If you would like a free subscription just go to www.officetimes.com to sign up. In my February 2020 was the…Read More→

In a survey of 150 C-suite executives conducted by the firm West Monroe, 29% are considering relocating their operations out of state or out of the country due to the high cost of living and high tax burdens. The top relocation is Texas, and the largest region of where these companies will be relocated from…Read More→

I’ve been researching just how safe elevators are during a pandemic, and while the risk factor might be low, you are still better off not having to ride in one. Is the cab small, limited to just one or two people, or  is it a larger elevator cab that can hold 4 standing 6 feet…Read More→

The downtown San Jose Google 79-acre development currently in planning stages will have 5,900 residential ‘dwelling units’, 500,000 square feet of retail stores, restaurants and cultural buildings, and 7.3 million square feet of office space. In the old days this might translate to 35-45,000 employees, and after Covid is gone may again be at this…Read More→

According to SocketSite, which tracks the San Francisco rental market, year-over-year apartment rents were down 20S%. The Bay Area regional planning agency, The Metropolitan Transportation Commission, is considering a mandate that large Bay Area employers have 6-% of their work force permanently work from home. Reported in today’s  East Bay Times, ‘Significant increases in available…Read More→

San Francisco now has an estimated 6.5 million square feet of office sublease space. Direct Class A rents are still among the highest in the country, averaging $84 an annual square foot, but Class B rates are now in the $50-60/rsf range. In the Bay Area several companies have announced they will relocate their headquarters…Read More→

California commercial real estate is expected to expand in 2022, according to the UCLA Anderson Forecast survey. The developers surveyed felt that 2020 would see a slight slowdown. The panelists were optimistic about industrial and multi-family, and in general pessimistic about retail. The only impediment to multi-family was the lack of qualified labor and resulting…Read More→

Buildings Magazine November 2019 had an article on what amenities tenants should be investing in. Sodexo surveyed 3,593 employees around the world, and here are some of the results: For ‘Experience Enhancers’, Café or restaurant 71%; medical services/clinic: 66%; Car sharing or shuttle services: 62%; vending services: 61%. For ‘Experience Essentials’, Cleaning of the workplace:…Read More→

A new startup called MainStreet entices employees frustrated by the high costs of the Bay Area by paying them $10,000 to relocate to a less expensive locale like Salt Lake City or Sacramento, they keep their tech jobs and work remotely from A co-working location where 20 people from 7 or 8 different companies may…Read More→

What, haven’t you heard about the Bay Area’s outrageous cost of housing and California’s crazy high tax structure? You could expand anywhere in the United States, go where the average price of a decent home is $250,000 or less, which might be just the down payment in the Bay Area! Then again, if you were…Read More→

“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a publicly broadcast Q & A with employees that his company is looking elsewhere for growth because of the Bay Area’s housing and traffic issues. The infrastructure here is really tapped. Housing prices are way up. Traffic is bad.” “Facebook’s largest locations outside of the Bay Area are Seattle,…Read More→