Janet Pogue McLaurin with Gensler, one of the nation’s gurus on predicting the future of corporate office layouts, functionality, and many other nuances of the office environment, wrote an article illustrating the key findings of a recent Gensler survey of CoreNet Global end users. ”Respondents rated the space effectiveness for each of the five…Read More→

In a BisNow article published November 17, 2022, “Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed plan to improve or expand their existing occupancy, Many are also implementing new procedures or technologies to help manage the shifting flor of employees into the office. Although hybrid work schedules are now the norm for 70% of workers, only one-third of…Read More→

The New York Times recently published a lengthy article titled ‘After pandemic, office buildings are still in trouble”. “ The value of office buildings could plunge 39%, or $454 billion, in the comping years, according to a recent study by business professors at Columbia University and New York University…In a sign of how fast the…Read More→

Credit for this statement goes to Jessica Pernicone, principal at JLL. “There is a certain amount of productivity you can get from being at home when you have heads-down deep work. However, if that’s not what your job requires all the time there are feelings of isolation and people start to feel disconnected from their…Read More→

  THEREGISTRY November 4, 2022, Cresa reported that Bay Area leasing activity to date remains 50.2 percent below 2019 levels during the same timeframe and in the last year, 3.6 million square feet of direct space has been added to landlords availability.  There is demand for trophy office space in San Francisco, upper floors with…Read More→

  “Is San Francisco’s CRE Market On the Verge Of Collapse?   MyEListing.com, a Texas-based commercial real estate marketplace, has published a report based on San Francisco data, and it paints a picture of a seriously struggling office market. The pandemic-driven “work-from-home” model appears to be taking permanent hold in The City by the Bay. With…Read More→

  The SF Business Times August 28, 2022 reported “The owners of nine San Francisco properties assessed at more than $100 million are scheduled to appear before a city board to reduce their assessments be cut in half”. They claim that the pandemic impact in 2021 dramatically affected their property values. I added up the…Read More→

Where is the office market headed, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area? Yahoo just put i’s entire new 657,934 sf San Jose office campus on the sublease market. PayPal just announced it was vacating Downtown San Francisco, as have a number of other high-profile corporations. Is this due in part to the onerous San…Read More→

Yesterday I attended a commercial real estate major investor and developer panel put on by my Northern California SIOR chapter at San Francisco’s Ferry Building  Overall everyone was very optimistic about 2022 and 2023. Paul Single with City National Bank told us our economy was unbelievably strong and interest rates were already up 175 basis…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→

Around the United States office occupancy levels are in the 40-60% range, but out in San Francisco it is in the 22-35% arena. San Francisco leaders are attempting to jump-start the return to the office, which has impacted the many restaurants and retailers who miss the foot traffic as well as major employers paying for…Read More→

  Yesterday Slack’s CEO called ‘Return to Work a Doomed Approach’ and put 208,000 square feet of space on the San Francisco sublet market. The SF Registry reported on Slack, “Communication software firm Slack has decided that the future of work is not necessarily in the office and has placed 208,460 square feet of space…Read More→

#SIORDeloitte just came out with a CEO Survey that found CEOs expect one-third of their workforce to continue working from him in January 2022 and anticipate needed 26% less office space in 2022, compared to 2019 levels. In pre-Covid for the most part most employees were expected to come into the office every day, but…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→

A report just out from Colliers has the I.S. office vacancy rate at 14.2%, with 45 million square feet of negative absorption during the first quarter of 2021, and a record 200,000,000 square feet of available sublease space. Ouch! “Recovery in the office market is set to lag, record levels of sublease space and negative…Read More→

On the one hand we are hearing about major tech companies announcing a phased return-to-the-office,  with announcements by most of the big boys like Facebook, Salesforce and Google. On the other hand, Airbnb just announced today it was expanding its sublease inventory to 438,000 square feet,  which adds 287,000 square feet to its previous space…Read More→

The San Francisco Business Times May 13, 2021 reported on a survey taking by Blind, an anonymous professional network, who asked over 3,000 employees if they would rather work from home permanently or get a $30,000 raise and 64% said they would rather work from home.  Employees of two companies  would take the cash over…Read More→

One of the country’s largest owner of office buildings is Boston Properties, and today they announced that this Labor Day, September 6, 2021 will mark the official day when the office market will  turn around. Boston Properties has 195 properties with more than 51 million square feet, and it is ready to take advantage of…Read More→

Bisnow April 20, 2021  Survey by Savills reports “Seventy-three percent of the respondent companies said that their employees will be in centralized offices at least three days a week, while very few (4%) expect all their workers to be required to show up in person five days a week. A vast majority of companies (79%) are…Read More→

There are currently 9.5 million square feet of office sublease space available in San Francisco today, with an overall vacancy rate above 19%. Landlord reps are still optimistic that the market will come back as more people get vaccinated, while the tenant-biased reps remind us that this it the time to snatch up bargain sublease…Read More→

The highways in the Bay Area seemed to be back to grid-lock during commute periods, and part of this can be attributed to workers avoiding public transportation and driving to work. As of April 21, 2021 Bart ridership was down 86% from its baseline. Out in the suburbs the majority of office building parking lots…Read More→

In today’s East Bay Times a recent poll of Bay Area residents concluded that 20% of those surveyed felt working in the office was ‘very unsafe’ and 33% felt it was ‘somewhat unsafe’ in a poll of 1,000 registered voters for the Bay Area Council.  This means more than half polled  did not feel safe…Read More→

Gensler, the largest architectural firm in the United States with a roster of some of the world’s largest corporate clients, has been studying the future of office space design. Outdoor spaces will be utilized for meeting areas, on rooftops, courtyards and nearby public areas. Safety for the employee will be forefront as the pandemic winds…Read More→

Great webinar yesterday with a panel of some of the largest San Francisco office landlords.  Here are a few of the highlights; There is a flight to quality, which does not necessarily mean Class A space. Sublease space is growing exponentially. How healthy buildings are during this Pandemic is imperative. Activity is coming back. Ground…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→

Yesterday I was on a very enlightening Zoom call with my San Francisco Colliers associates. The office market is seeing landlords hold firm on their asking rents, and there are still Class A office leases happening in the $100/rsf annual price range, per square foot. The top ten buildings have less than 10% vacancy so…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→

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area a number of tech companies have recently announced that large portions or in some cases, all of their office facilities are on the sublease market. Work-from-home is here to stay for many reasons and this does not bode well for the overall health of the office market. However,…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→

  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→

Yelp just placed 14 stories at 140 new Montgomery St., San Francisco, totally 161,876 square feet, and plans to retain a HQ in San Francisco. “With more employees working remotely we’re reducing some of our footprint in San Francisco, but we will still maintain our HQ office there,” the Yelp spokesperson said, adding that the…Read More→

David Amsterdam, President of Colliers Capital Markets, just sent out a bulletin with the following bullet points: Q4 negative absorption of 40.9 million sf is second-highest on record…ten metros posted negative absorption of at least one million (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago)…Sublease space now a record 188 million sf. I have been doing…Read More→

But the real story is a number of reports predicting that Corporate America will be downsizing by 25% of its total office space. This means we may have 1,561,273,198 square feet of vacant office space as companies trend towards partial or total long-term work-from-home strategies, which means we have another 773 million square feet of…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→

At a recent webinar where I forecast what was going to happen in the various commercial real estate segments over the next few years we had several surveys. One was asking our audience, which included CPA’s, bankers, realtors and lawyers, when they thought the office market was going to return, and the overwhelming consensus was…Read More→

  It is bad enough that San Francisco Bay Area corporations are putting leased space on the sublease market, packing up and moving part of their operations to Texas or elsewhere, but when major companies begin putting their office campuses on the ‘for sale’ market this is a much more serious sign of what might…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→

  Colliers just completed a study Implications of COVID-19 on the Workplace with data from more than 5,000 global respondents.  76% reported same or improved levels of productivity. 74% felt connected to their team even though not physically with them  67% experienced improvement in work-life balance, and 83% wanted to work from home at least…Read More→

  Cynthia Milota of Ware Malcomb and Sally Augustin, Design With Science, wrote an article for Corenet Global discussing working from home vs returning to the office. “Organizations are re-imagining their mobility profiles. W1ill they be remote first with come in-office presence, or will the model largely be in-office first while allowing for remote work?…Read More→

  This was  the headline of a Bisnow report from a few days ago, citing 42 million square feet of new subleases hitting the market with 73 U.S. markets reporting negative absorption. Then the next day the Colliers ‘Disruption 2020: Office Sublease Continues To Rise, reporting that sublease space is 30 million higher than it…Read More→

One idea is, using your exclusive tenant rep broker, to go after office subleases that might be much larger than your initial requirement but can accommodate your growth longer-term, and then make aggressive offers (yes, I know this will irritate some listing  agents) 50% or even 25% of asking…in today’s market there may be Sub-landlords…Read More→

Maya Donnon, Sven Schroeter of KSS Architects (among other co-authors) in a Corenet Global article titled ‘Why Workplace’ discuss the paradox corporate America is going through. They cite Facebook who has committed remote work as a permanent option for its employees while at the same time committing to millions of feet of new office space….Read More→

BISNOW Oct. 30, 2020 reports that real estate companies think they’ll need less office space. “More than any other industry, real estate has a vested interest in making sure office occupiers don’t cut their real estate footprint. Office is the largest of the real estate asset classes, and a reduction in demand would lead to…Read More→