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→

Christopher Aquilina, SIOR with tenant rep firm Spring 4 n the United Kingdom, , said “Tenants are increasingly understanding that if they want to woo their staff back from WFH (work from home), they need to offer best-in-class office space in a convenient location.” He goes on to say  “Developers need to be part of…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→

I have been predicting for some time that office occupancy will go up over the next few years-in my opinion from the roughly 50% where we are now to perhaps 70% once all the corporate mandates become effective. However, we will not get anywhere close to the pre-Covid levels as there has been a transformational…Read More→

“The self-proclaimed leader of the return-to-work movement is now staring down some of the emptiest office buildings in the country. Houston, Dallas and Austin are the first-, second- and third-most-vacant office markets among the nation’s largest 50 metros, according to Moody’s Analytics.”, according to Bisnow 2/29/24. I still think San Francisco has a higher vacancy, but…Read More→

In Bisnow February 25, 2024, ”Paul Darrah, who is the chief workplace office for Citadel which has $92.46 billion under management, said he believes that the rest of the corporate world will eventually succeed in getting employees to show up. Citadel is leaning into in-office work as the hedge fund posts double-digit returns. It is planning billion-dollar office towers in Miami and…Read More→

According to Mortgage Bankers Association, it is 929 billion but close enough to the Big T…there were loan extensions from last year that increased this. According to Bisnow Feb. 13, 2024, “Prices on commercial properties have fallen 21% from an early 2022 peak. Office prices have dropped most precipitously, sinking 35%.”  This will make refinancing challenging in…Read More→

  “Office buildings across the country are starting to trade at significant markdowns, in many cases selling for less than the value of their loan. Those types of transactions, executed in concert with the buildings’ lenders, are known as short sales. Economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research estimate that about 44% of all office properties are underwater on…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→

Blackstone, the world’s largest owner of commercial real estate, owned 1740 Broadway, New York, an office building that was appraised in 2015 at $605 million, with a $308 million-dollar CMBS loan and the loan is now on the market for $150 million. As reported in Bisnow January 17, 2024, “Blackstone’s handling of 1740 Broadway is one of several…Read More→

San Francisco Business Times January 19, 2024 Various headlines from just this one issue: First page, ‘The Coming Debt Wave’, Page 6, ‘Another S.F. Property Could Be Headed for Default’  about 140 Second St. in SF, ‘S.F. Trophy Onwers Buy Some Time’ regarding the 1.6 million square foot One Market which had gone into special…Read More→

This was the headline from the January 8, 2024 BisNow newsletter. “Roughly 19.6% of office space in major American metropolitan areas was vacant at the end of the year, according to new data from Moody’s Analytics. That is up from 18.8% at the end of 2022 and higher than the previous record of 19.3% reached in 1986 and 1991.” Texas…Read More→

  I’ve been speaking with commercial real estate appraisers about this recent sale and the impact it will have on future office building financings, refinances and sales. This is an official comp that will be hard to ignore, and will make it mch harder to prove to a buyer or lender that your similar Class…Read More→

  Bisnow 12/19/23 reported that according to data from the National Bureau f Economic Research, 44% of bank loans are on property values that are less than the outstanding loan balances. This means that even if the lender is willing to refinance, which most these days aren’t, they will require the borrower to pay down…Read More→

  The SF Business Times 12/8/23 summarized the numerous bargain office building sales over the past few months. Presidio Bay Ventures bought 160 Spear St for $260/sf, SKS Partners and Swig bought 350 California for $215/sf, Ridge Capital paid $255/sf for 180 Howard St., and Strada may be buying 201 Sper St. for under $300/rsf….Read More→

San Francisco’s office vacancy rate of 35%, the highest on record, is expected to climb further as corporations continue to give up office space as they ‘rightsized’. Pre-pandemic the vacancy rate was below 5%!  According to the San Francisco Business Times 12/5/23, “Salesforce which announced its plans tp lean out its real estate portfolio at…Read More→

  Almost all of the predictiions I have made over the past 43 years which have been published in one of my 249 newsletters have come true, and since they are all in print you can check me out! Here is my current prediction.  The commercial real estate market in the United States, especially in…Read More→

  This was the headline of a November 14, 2023, BisNow report. “Revenue at companies with flexible work-from-home policies grew four times faster than those with in-person requirements,  according to a new study by Scoop Technologies and Boston Consulting Group.”

Walmart is subleasing 719,000 of office space in a four-building complex at Crossman Drive at Caribbean Drive in Sunnyvale, and OpenAi will be leasing 40,000 sf t 1455 and 1515 Third Street in San Francisco. Hooray!!

I have recently interviewed a number of office building experts and for suburban Class A office buildings in the Walnut Creek/Concord, Northern California region the cost to build a brand-new Class A office building is $500-700/square foot. This price includes land, architectural, permits, construction of the base building, parking structure, all the soft costs like…Read More→

  There is simply no way to sugar-coat what is happening in most parts of the United States in regard to office space and the office market. In just the past few days, Block announced it will cut 1,000 jobs, Microsoft placed 130,000 square feet of its 355 Market Street, San Francisco space on the…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→

Contrary to reports of corporate executives mandating or begging or offering incentives for employees to return to the office, many will and many won’t. Either way we have far too much office space than is needed, even if more folks come into the office three days a week. As a case in point, last week…Read More→

A recent 2023 U.S. CEO Outlook survey by corporate-services firm KPMG poll showed that CEO confidence in having their employees return to the office almost doubled over the past year,, and while 45% believed that workers would continue in hybrid positions last year, in 2023 only 34% believe this. Last year 20% of CEOs thought corporate…Read More→

The SF Business Times  Oct. 2, 203 reported on a recent survey of 2,000 full0time employees by Owl Labs, The Hybrid Work Survey, which found “…69% of employees believe their company is requiring in-office work due simply to traditional work expectations. That disconnect is one of many factors that have limited enthusiasm for returning to…Read More→

The San Francisco Business Times reported September 28, 2023 that the CEO of Prologis, Hamid Moghadam, who runs the Billiion (yes, Billion!) square foot portfolio of industrial real estate said  “What are the big decisions we make?” he said. “What do we charge for a lease, how long of a lease do we sign ……Read More→

Major brokerage companies report San Francisco office vacancy now almost 34%. And including s[ace for space that isn’t vacant over 37%. AI is the big new wonder leasing office space in the City, but for every new AI lease another existing tenant is downsizing. As of this week  national office occupancy is up just a…Read More→

  The Bay Area News Group reported that 26% of residents work remotely, down from 36% in 2021. However, ‘despite the drop-off, there were still more than four times as many people working from home in 2022 as in ears leading up the pandemic, when just 6% of workers were mostly remote.’ Public transit ridership…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→

“Back in April, Dropbox announced it was cutting 500 employees. In May, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas let go of almost 4,000 people. And in July, the founder of an e-commerce startup said he laid off 90% of his support team. The common reason cited? You guessed it: artificial intelligence. Goldman Sachs economists have estimated that 300 million full-time…Read More→

Bisnow 8/23/23 Goldman Sachs is cracking down on making sure everyone comes back to the office full-time “though revenue-producing employees have for the most part returned full time, the publication reports that senior managers are frustrated by the reluctance of other staff, “constituting a significant chunk of its workforce,” to come back.   Google is…Read More→

  I was recently asked by a business reporter if, with suburban Class A office buildings like 2300 Clayton in Concord, California selling for as low as $110 a square foot, are we at the bottom of the cycle? This particular office building is one of my favorite, and back in 1985 I brought the…Read More→

The San Francisco Business Times August 29, 2023 reported that the latest Survey of Business Uncertainty (what a name!) from the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank, University of Chicago and Stanford University, which surveys 500 business executives each month, ‘Executives predicted that about 72.6% of their employees would be working full-time onsite in 2028, down slightly…Read More→

There was a recent announcement of the largest office deal done in the past 12 months in the Oakland area. Delta Dental leased the third floor of 1333 Broadway (where 40 years ago I had my offices at Grubb & Ellis), and while it was great that this ‘largest’ deal was done, the size of…Read More→

According to the SF Business Times, ’San Francisco Sees Significant Jump in Return-To-Office Study’, with a 38% year-over-year increase in visits to office buildings in San Francisco. San Francisco foot traffic downtown remains down 56% from 2019. Ok, that was the good news.  On August 13, 2023   the U. S. Department of Health and Human…Read More→

  There are a new host of nontraded REITs being formed raising money to look for bargain commercial properties and swoop in when they think the price has dropped low enough to make sense. In a BisNow August , 2023 article “Nontraded REITs in aggregate have produced a total return over the last five years…Read More→

  On average, wrote Jerry Nickelsburg, an adjunct professor of economics at UCLA who helped run the survey, participants in both Northern and Southern California “expect both rental rates and occupancy rates to weaken in the coming year” and do not expect the sector to make a full recovery by 2026. San Francisco Business Times August…Read More→

  Today Google reduced the amount of funds budgeted for closing offices which might be a sign that perhaps the layoffs and worker reductions were coming to an end.  They spent $69 million in cutting space this last quarter, down from$565 million it spent the first quarter of 2023.  There was also a report out…Read More→

Lender Sues to Foreclose on WeWork’s San Francisco Tower ($240 mil loan on a 359,000 sf 20-story Class A office building): Blackstone Reports Income from eal Estate Sales Down 96% in Q2; Commercial Property Distress Hits $71B in Q2, Led By Office; Marketing Of Distressed Loop Building (1.4M sf in Chicago) Will Test Waters For…Read More→

Credits to Stephen Newbold, National Director of Office Research for Colliers. The national vacancy rate just went up to 16.4%, which is a record high. The suburban rate is 16.0% and CBD rate is 17.3%. There are 88 million square feet of new office buildings under construction, with 12 mil in New York City, 8.1…Read More→

Clara O’Brien, writing in Modern Farmer July 11, 2023 wrote a thought-provoking article about using vacant office space to grow fruits and vegetables. “In Calgary, Alberta (Canada) AgriPlay Ventures transformed part of underutilized office space in Calgary Tower Center into one of Canada’s largest indoor urban farms earlier this year…Currently, AgriPlay Farms is negotiating offers…Read More→

ResumeBuillder surveyed 1,500 full-time corporate workers in June, 2023 and found that: 85% of workers go to the office at least once a week 63% said going to the office improves productivity, top reason being more efficient teamwork 13% said productivity goes down in the office, and 25% of these say it’s a result of…Read More→