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→

Last week I wason a national Zoom call with 60 fellow SIOR members. While the office market in most areas has been hit by heavy amounts of office sublease space put on the market and corporate indecision on where and how much office space will be taken down long-term, the industrial market has been off…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→

Remember after a major earthquake we stock up on bottled water, battery-operated radios, freeze-dried food, and other necessities if we were shut off from civilization until the highways and bridges were fixed? Now we have major Covid-19 sanitization, consultants advising office building owners to invest in self-opening doors, touchless elevator controls, and temperature checking stations…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→

In the SF Business Times April 1, 2021, John McNellis, who is one of the top Retail industry gurus, reflected on what retail types thrived during the past years pandemic, and which didn’t. Home Depot and others in that category had a great year as those stuck at home worked on remodeling projects. Netflix did…Read More→

Wells Fargo just told its employees that employees would be coming back to the office after Labor Day. “We believe most of us benefit by being physically together”, Wells told employees. They currently have 200,000 employees working from home. Google said some of its U.S. employees could return t the offices this month in a…Read More→

The Colliers Capital Markets recent report on where national CMBS delinquencies stand had overall improvement for the eighth straight month, with Industrial (0.9%), office (2%) and multifamily (2.3%)  having the lowest delinquency rates. Hotel delinquencies are the highest (16.4%), , with retail second (11.8%). “The Mortgage Bankers Association notes that 5.2% of commercial and multifamily…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→

Retail deals are happening in a number of regions. Restaurants might be getting extensive up-front free rent from the landlords to get them through the pandemic months, and in turn landlords may be going to their lenders to try to get loan restructures commensurate with these concessions. I’ve seen national retail reports stating both that…Read More→

According to a recent article from Walker & Dunlop published in Bisnow, “From beer kegs to nap rooms to cold-plunge pools, the 2010s saw a parade of trendy office “perks”. For the companies that called the offices home, these add-ons were meant to bolster a bespoke brand of company culture, whether relaxed, luxurious or hyper-productive….Read More→

Colliers just sent out a brief report on the current state of the national retail market. The good news is Q4 showed signs of recovery, with positive absorption and retail rent collections up to 86%, a huge uptick since the heart of the pandemic. The bad news, 27.6 million square feet of negative absorption in…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→

Salesforce, the largest employer in San Francisco with over 2,000,000 square feet of office space, just announced that 65% of its employees can come into the office one to three days a week, and for employees that don’t live near an office or have roles that don’t require an office, can work remotely full-time. “The…Read More→

  The Society of Industrial and Office Realtors sent out a great short video that you can access at www.SIOR.com/snapshot. Here are the highlights: Industrial real estate confidence is high at 6.9 (out of 10), while office confidence is low at 4.7. “The pandemic continues to negatively affect almost all market sectors…and is expected to…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→

In Bill Gladstone’s excellent Real Estate Review (he is a top commercial SIOR broker in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania), author Jesse Harlan discusses potential exposure of commercial property owners if their building is vacant, and even if it is partially or fully leased but due to the pandemic not fully occupied…there still might be exposure to the…Read More→

AtlantaRetail just reported in Bisnow that the 560,000 square foot Town Center at Cobb mall was foreclosed by Deutsche Bank Feb. 2, 2021, receiving no bids at the foreclosure auction. The mall was valued at $322 million in 2012, but dropped to only $120 million at time of foreclosure. The Cobb Country Commissioner, JoAnn Birrell…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→

  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→

According to the East Bay Times reporter George Avalos, California lost 1.41 million jobs last year. Ouch! Michael Bernick, employment attorney with Duane Morris and former EDD Director, said “We are looking at a much more gradual recovery than first hoped, and a lot of jobs that were lost are going to be lost permanently,…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 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→

A number of the major fast food restaurants are coming out with new store designs, emphasizing drive-through and take out, and in some cases eliminating the dining option entirely. Burger King has two new concepts, one with three drive-through lanes, one dedicated to delivery drivers, and a parking lot where customers can order through their…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→

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→

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→

  Stephen Newbold, National Director of Office Research for Colliers International reported that in Q3 of 2020 the United States experienced 33.5 million sf of negative absorption and office subleases in the US hit a record at 168.8 million sf. This is more distressing than we experienced during the Great Recession. The bad news was…Read More→

  A number of large office users have delayed the return to their offices until mid-2021, while others have told their employees they can work remotely permanently. Facebook and other major players have allowed their employees to relocate to lower-cost regions, some taking a pay cut but still saving substantially over their previous San Francisco…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→