I sometimes get swept up in the grand scheme of what AI is doing to make corporations and their processes more efficient, but I saw a recent quote that brought it closer to home for me. n The San Francisco Business Times April 16, 2026, quoting Wen Sang, Co-founder of Genspark AI which had two…Read More→

The San Francisco Business Times (1/9/25) reported that 6.8 million feet of San Francisco office space has been leased to AI companies! Wow! They also stated “Underused empty office buildings in the East Bay’s suburban markets are being eyed for residential developments in record numbers. So far, 1.3 million square feet of office space has…Read More→

Basically, there has been little news over the past month. AI continues to lease space in San Francisco, tech companies have been purchasing  office buildings in Silicon Valley, foreclosures and discounted commercial property debt continue, there is a lot of capital looking for solid investments, the $1-5 million dollar mom & pop retail and warehouse…Read More→

About to close escrow, according to TheRegistryy-9/18/25 , 201 California Street, San Francisco, a 272,000 square foot office property which was purchased in December 2019 for $239 million, $878/sf, may be going now for$57 million, $250/sf and a 75% discount…

I have been hearing the rumors for several months, and there is still no official confirmation but yet another Class A major office complex out in the suburbs of San Ramon, California may be headed for demolition. I tried to tour an office client through 2000 Canyon Place which has a twin to tallying 320,000…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→

According to articles from CBS and Sacramento Bee (8/12/25), “A new audit found that the State of California could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year by not enforcing return-to-office orders for state workers. The audit comes amid the saga for state workers and the political debate between remote versus in-person work. It found that…Read More→

“In 2025, twenty percent of $4.8 trillion of outstanding commercial mortgages held by lenders and investors will mature, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Among loans backed by industrial properties, 22 percent will come due in 2025, as will 24 percent of office loans. In recent years, lenders have allowed extensions when loans come due,…Read More→

City, county and state governments…so these are captive users of office space, and right now there is an extended Prrime Day offce building sale going on where in many parts of the United States a government or non-profit entity can purchase a quality office building at a 70-80% discount. How come more municipalities aren’t doing…Read More→

David Amsterdam, President, Capital Markets for Colliers had a few noteworthy comments. “Office vacancies set another all-time high, though they are increasing at a more moderate pace.” Nice spin…’Supply-side pressure has all but shut down, setting the stage for recovery in the quarters ahead….Economic uncertainty has many occupiers in a wait-and-see holding pattern. The market…Read More→

The Guardian July 13, 2025 “With financial districts struggling to bounce back to full capacity post-Covid, and the nightlife industry facing an existential crisis, there are suggestions clubs could move into deserted office blocks at evenings and weekends. In its annual eccentric report on the future of leisure, the creative studio Bompas and Parr says…Read More→

Lawrence Stone , Santa Clara County Assessor, Always Has Great Insights!   My favorite County Assessor in the entire Country has been Lawrence Stone, who is retiring from Santa Clara County Assessor after over three decades in this role and 47 years as a public servant. His Annual Report is superb, loaded with facts and…Read More→

Over my past 45 years of predicting where we are in the office market, and my published and printed newsletters sent out every other month will attest to how lucky and accurate I have been so far…well, I hereby declare June 10, 2025 as the official bottom of the office market…I am seeing more and…Read More→

Bisnow May 29, 205, according to a CBRE report, “Artificial intelligence (AI) development likely will be a sizable driver of U.S. office demand over the next decade considering the impact it is already having on the country’s tech epicenter of San Francisco. AI-related companies have leased more than 5 million sq. ft. of San Francisco…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→

As reported in the Colliers U.S. Leading Office Markets Q1 2025 report, “Across the 14 gateway regions, 52.8% of the total construction pipeline is preleased. Of the 10.4  MSF of preleasing in active construction buildings (for leases over 50,000 SF in size), FIRE tenants committed to 61.2% of new space. Wells Fargo has preleased 1.2…Read More→

There was an announcement in TheRegistry that Google is putting over 1,000,000 square feet of office space on the market at Pacific Shores, Redwood City.  Yesterday there was a press release that Workday in Pleasanton was putting a 209,000 square foot office building on the market, vacant. A week ago I toured a Concord office…Read More→

The Seller acquired this 24-story office building, built in 1988, back in 2005 for $314/rsf so the discount is not as bad as some of the other recent Class A office sales in San Francisco, where the original purchase back in 2018 or 2019 was in the $500-700/rsf range…still, just another sign that our market…Read More→

Globest.com reported that the 3,165-unit apartment complex in San Francisco, Parkmerced, is in default after the owner, Maximus Real Estate Partners defaulted on a $1.5 billion dollar loan backed by the complex.  There have also been articles like one in the March 20, 2025 Business Times “Paramount wrote the value of its investment in the…Read More→

According to the San Francisco Business Tims February 28, 2025, “A majority of San Francisco business leaders said their companies have plans to expand their offices in the city as they both push for more in-person work and grow headcount, according to a survey by KPMG. Three-quarters of the 100 San Francisco-based executives surveyed by…Read More→

  Two years ago at our annual Northern California SIOR Chapter event at the San Francisco Ferry Building, where major industrial developers forecast what they think this industry segment will be doing over the next year…I remember a consistent comments that their pencils were put away and that new Bay Area industrial development for the…Read More→

I have been writing and publishing the OfficeTimes Corporate Office Perspective for the past 45 years, and during this time I have made many industry predictions. Almost every one of them has come true, and this is documented if you want to check. It almost feels like we are at the office building bottom, but…Read More→

San Francisco and Oakland have been experiencing fire-sale pricing of office buildings over the past few years, with office properties that previously sold for $500-1000/rsf selling for $350-300/rsf/ Very recently we are beginning to hear of I-680 Corridor Class A, well-located office buildings and complexes potentially on the way to Trustee sales in the $100-200/rsf…Read More→

  It took DOGE only six days to terminate 22 Federal leases. GSA oversees the federal government’s 360 million square feet of owned and leased properties.  Landlords with GSA as a tenant may be worried as many leases have early termination clauses. As reported in a January 18, 2018 Colliers Insights report, “Investors and lenders…Read More→

It has been suggested to me that I try to put a more positive spin on my blogs regarding the office market…so here goes!  If you ever wanted to purchase a downtown San Francisco high rise office building for 30% of what the price was five years ago, now is your chance!  This week I…Read More→

6001 Shellmond St., Emeryville, a110,000 sf Class A eight-story office building with adjacent shopping and retail was purchased in 2017 for $33 million, and the $21.6 million loan was just purchased for $6.8 million last month. $300/sf before,$62/sf now…

“Roughly 11% of office buildings tied to CMBS loans were delinquent, beating the previous high watermark of 10.7% set during the Great Recession in December 2012, according to Trepp, which began tracking the CMBS sector in 2000. More than $2B in office loans became freshly delinquent in December, causing a 63-basis-point increase in the overall delinquency rate,…Read More→

GSA has 78 million sf of office leases either expiring or can be terminated by end of 2028. While there appears to be a push to get all government employees back in the office five-days a week, The American Federation of Government Employees union just reached a deal with GSA to protect and extend hybrid…Read More→

I was at a recent broker event with specialists from different commercial real estate segments. Here are some interesting insights from this…the housing market has slowed down; less folks are buying homes and that may have dramatically impacted a number of other industries. Our industrial folks say the construction companies are downsizing, giving up warehouse…Read More→

In BizNow 10/23/24 Jarred Schenke’s article warns about the tax exposure that might result from a landlord handing the keys of the property back to the lender. On top of losing whatever equity you may have once had, in addition to all the time and expense purchasing and then managing the property, there may be…Read More→

Jarred Schenke, writing in NationalCapital Markets,  “In total, roughly $3.3B of CMBS loans were transferred to special servicing during the month of September, $1.9B of which were office loans. Now 12.6% of all CMBS office loans are being specially serviced, up from 8.3% at this point last year. The special servicing rate increased for all…Read More→

  Much of the United States office markets are still experiencing vacancy rates in around 20%, and in the San Francisco Bay Area even higher, with Oakland at 29% and San Francisco at 35%. I have mentioned previously that the Amazon announcement mandating five-day a week return to office may have a positive impact on…Read More→

In San Francisco KPMG just announced it was downsizing from 143,000 sf of office space into 96,000 sf. This is a common trend amount financial services firms. “About 1,000 employees will be based out of the office, the same number based out of 555 Second. Chris Cimino, who leads KPMG’s San Francisco office, said the…Read More→

Bisnow National 9/13/24  had a number of article headlines, including “Business Leaders Look to Increase Real Esate Investments”, Brookfield Predicts Robust Office Recover Market Rebound”, Major Investors Return to the Market”, Commercial Real Estate Investors Ready to Get Back in the Market”…not bad for just one day’s headlines!!!  

Bisnow July 19, 2024, had a string of very positive commercial real estate headlines. At the top was “Goldman Sacs Reports Gains in Real Estate Investments’ and when I dug into the article, it turns out they got ahead of the curve last year and wrote off a ton of poor investments, and now they…Read More→

A recent article in Bisnow July 8, 2024 cited San Francisco Class-A office vacancy increasing for the 10th consecutive quarter, “as more than a third of the city’s office buildings remain empty.  The vacancies, brought on by layoffs and hybrid work, are expected to remain elevated through the end of the year. Placer.ai’s monthly data…Read More→

  A perfect storm of plunging property values for aging buildings, weak tenant demand coming out of the pandemic and high interest rates for new loans and refinancing has left the $2.4 trillion office building sector wobbling. In New York 1740 Broadway which Blackstone had paid $600 million for ten years earlier just sold for…Read More→

There are a number of reports around the country that price discounts on office buildings are a boon to non-profits who have access to cash to acquire these office facilities for their own long-term use. Bisnow June 3, 2024 “With overall U.S. commercial real estate pricing down 21% from its March 2022 peak, according to Green Street,…Read More→

“For the first time since the financial crisis, investors in top-rated bonds backed by commercial real estate debt are getting hit with losses. Buyers of the AAA portion of a $308 million note backed by the mortgage on a building in midtown Manhattan got back less than three-quarters of their original investment after the loan was sold…Read More→

Bisnow May 8, 2024, It is not easy or inexpensive, but many office projects have ample parking and are located near residential and commercial areas. “Leopardo Vice President of Healthcare David Rutledge said when developers are looking to build a new healthcare facility from the ground up, they often find that ideal sites like Knightly…Read More→

I’ve had folks tell me the positive news that institutional investors are once again purchasing San Francisco office buildings, which to them is a sign this market is recovering. I remind them that the price might be twenty cents on the dollar, and if you own other office buildings this is a great way to…Read More→

I was in a recent meeting and was made aware of multiple suburban office buildings where the tenants had been on month-to-month and were all finally given notice to vacate.  I met with a major office park investor who is planning on demolishing a number of very nice Class A office buildings, relocating the tenants…Read More→

The Standard, April 24, 2024: “By the end of 2019, the 20 biggest tech employers had leased more than 16 million square feet of space, nearly a quarter of the city’s total office stock. Now, those same companies are holding onto only 8.3 million square feet, according to data from real estate firm CBRE. “We’ve just…Read More→

This may be a new record for the most office space, both direct as well as for sublease, in the United States, according to Avison Young. This is 23.7% of the office inventory in the country. Some positive trends that may improve office Landlord’s assets in this Bisnow April 8, 2024 article, “Swaths of layoffs…Read More→

Amazon Slashing office space, will save $1.3 Billion in Costs. Will let leases expire and negotiate early lease terminations.  Starwood Capital paid almost $500 million in 2019 for three Downtown Oakland office buildings, and after just defaulting on a 364.5-million-dollar loan has given up ownership of 2100 Franklin, 2101 Webster and 1901 Harrison. San Francisco’s…Read More→