BisNow April 27, 202,6 reported that the three largest office-to-residental markets are New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Chicago has a conversion pipeline of 5,000 units while Washington D.C. with the fourth-largest market for conversions had a 4,167 unit pipeline. The typical office conversion candidate is an older building with smaller floorplates in the core…Read More→

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→

April 6, 2026  By Roger Vincent  Los Angeles Times  “Capital Group declined to confirm the reported $ 210 million sale price for the Bank of America Plaza, but the building was last appraised in late 2024 at $212.5 million, down from $605 million 10 years earlier, according to Bloomberg. Capital Group paid about $150 per…Read More→

I have a very good friend who runs an engineering and manufacturing company with less than 200 employees. He recently told me the deeper he gets into the new AI tools the more he is convinced that within the next six months he won’t need half of his current employees. This is in engineering, administration,…Read More→

Silicon Valley helped put the San Francisco/Bay Area including Silicon Valley on the map back in the 1970’s, and South San Francisco is the 2nd biggest Biotech center after Boston-Cambridge. Genetech just unveiled its $5 billion dollar plan to overhaul its 225-acre campus in South San Francisco. Last year the San Francisco Bay Area had…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→

“According to a survey of nearly 1,000 business leaders by Resume Builder, three in 10 companies plan to fully eliminate remote work in 2026 and have employees back in the office five days a week. Many companies have already taken that step in 2025, with a host of corporate titans and tech heavy-weights eliminating or…Read More→

CoStar November 30, 2025 reported on a study by MIT that artificial intelligence is now able to replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market. This is The Project Iceberg Project Iceberg – Coordinating the Human-AI Future which focuses on 151 million working Americans and projects 13,741 workers apparently can or will be replaced by AI,…Read More→

  Office building sales continue to experience at times significant discounts as compared to pre-Covid values, and as a recent case in point 2001 Broadway in Oakland, California, a 56,000 square foot office building just closed escrow in October at a 76% price drop as compared to what it was purchased for in 1016.  $19.5…Read More→

FastCompany 10/28/25 reporting on Amazon announcing 14,000 layoffs, citing AI innovation, “While the memo makes clear that artificial intelligence is ushering in rapid changes that will result in leaner operations, an Amazon source said that AI was not behind the vast majority of the layoffs.”  These are not warehouse layoffs but ’corporate workforce’ employees who…Read More→

Nigel Hughes, Senior Director of Market Analytics for CoStar gave an excellent presentation yesterday on the state of the East Bay market. A lot of sobering facts…Healthcare is one of the sectors increasing their office and medical space, as is AI, while most of the other more traditional components of office leasing  (financial, law, services)…Read More→

In a recent poll, 63% say they worked fully in person in 2025 as compared with 46% who worked fulltime in the office in2024. “Demand for office space will probably not return to pre-pandemic levels, said Santa Clara County Assessor Gret Monteverde, since working from home “seems to be at some level something that is…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→

One the one hand, “The half-decade push to bring employees back to the office after the onset of the pandemic has crossed a significant threshold, according to JLL: More than half of employees at Fortune 100 companies are now required to come in five days a week. July 23, 2025 “  ET Emily Wishingrad, Washington, D.C.  While…Read More→

I get caught up in my San Francisco East Bay region that I sometimes forget what is happening to our local office market may also be doing the same in other regions. The SF Business Times July 18, 2025, headlined “San Mateo’s Office Glut to Fuel Demolition Wave”, and describes how this 8 million square…Read More→

  June 10, 2025 I stuck my neck out and delcared that the officical ‘Bottom of the Office Market’ day…since then other corporations have added return-to-office mandates, but one of the strongest cases for the future return of the office was the announcement by Hines that they would like to build a 1,225 foot office…Read More→

You can go back to my newsletters and blogs over the past year, but I have repeated opinioned that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is allowing corporations to do more work with less employees. I haven’t seen any documented studies yet, but asreported in Techspot June 27, 2025, “Salesforce CEO says 50% of company work is now…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→

The good news is that more people are coming to work in downtown San Francisco in 2025. “Office badge-swipe data compiled by the security company Kastle from select buildings in the San Francisco area continue to show weekly office-occupancy numbers compared to pre-COVID attendance being among the lowest of 10 metropolitan areas. For the week ending…Read More→

Just this week’s headlines….Machine Investment Group Acquires Distressed San Jose Luxury Condominium Development; Lener Takes Back 541-Room Signia by Hilton in San Jose Deal; Peninsula Land & Capital Buys 210,000 SQFT Class A Office Property in Walnut Creek for $22.5MM ($107/rsf, versus the $66 million-$314/sf)  the former owners paid for the property in 2017).  So…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→

I’ve been predicting that the private industry and government mandates that office workers return to the office will boost occupancy from the current 50% to 60% but not bring back pre-Covid levels is being born out. BisNow reported on March 10, 2025, that the average office foot traffic is 64% of 2019 levels and average…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→

  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→

“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→

One of my colleagues gave me an article,’ Meet the People Who Refused to Go Back to the Office and Lost Their Jobs’. It references Amazon, UPS, Morgan Chase and Boeing mandating that their employees return to the office five days a week. The article quotes workers who were mandated to return, who didn’t and…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→

Bisnow reported on Dec. 4, 2024 that Brookfield Properties 8 million square foot office portfolio is now being  powered by nuclear energy.  “It not only sets a new standard for how owners can purchase clean energy, but it’s also a very scalable model that other property owners can follow,” Brookfield Properties Senior Vice President of…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→

A double-default is when a real estate borrower has trouble with their loan, either it is due and they are unable o refinance, or they can’t make the payments, and they do a work-out with the lender. The terms are adjusted, or the loan is extended, or other loan modifications so the lender doesn’t have…Read More→

I attended our Fall SIOR National Conference in Los Angeles, and one of the sessions discussed how and why our country will experience increased energy shortfalls. One speaker said that a Chatgpt search uses 17 times more energy than a Google search, and we are seeing huge demand increases for data centers across the Country….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→

According to a recent report by JLL, nationwide lab space availability is now 30% and this is expected to rise further. “The report predicts rents will continue dropping and that it could take years before the local markets work through their supply backlogs.”  This is sobering as this segment of the industry was previously a…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→

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→

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→

“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→

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→