The San Francisco Business Times August 7, 2023 referred to a recent CoStar analysis that found 55% of office leases signed before the pandemic have yet to expire, which could spell a lot more office vacancy grief as corporations downsize on renewal or relocate to smaller spaces. ‘”All of the pain we’ve been seeing…Read More→

Mayor London Breed is trying to get this tax reduce, and it appears to be a double-dipping with the tenant paying for their lease and again for their sublease. San Francisco, with a current vacancy rate of 30% and over 8 million square feet of office space for sublease, has an impacted downtown in desperate…Read More→

There area large group of folks, including most office building owners, landlord leasing agents, and older executive heads of thousands of companies, who still hold a belief that at some point in the not-to-distant future office workers will return to the office in force. This will be a combination of executive mandate, the recognition that…Read More→

Tidewater Capital just received approval for a 420,000 sf Oakland CA office tower, so Hope Springs eternal with office developers despite the current and near-term market. At least one regional bank is requiring employees back to the office. AT&T is mandating managers return to the office, and Blackrock is requiring four-days a week in the…Read More→

Statistics just out today by the awesome Colliers Research Department shows that the I-680 Corridor (Danville up to Martinez, and Orinda to Walnut Creek) has a direct vacancy of only 16% and when you include sublease office space, 17.6%. This ranges from a low in Danville of 7.7% to a high at the Pleasant Hill…Read More→

Salesforce Just Put 125,000 sf of excess office space on the San Francisco market. According to one report I read, this puts the total of Salesforce San Francisco downsizing to one million square feet. Meanwhile its profits are going through the roof, with sales up 14% year-over-year and net profit at $23 Billion!  Guidewire just…Read More→

  Meta (Facebook) just put 432,000 square feet of Class A San Francisco office space on the sublease market, with a lease term running until March 2031. This adds office inventory to the current 28% San Francisco office vacancy. Up in Portland, KBS REITS just defaulted on a 224,000 sf LEED Gold-certified office building with…Read More→

  Meta has placed 114,000 sf off office space in Fremont on the sublease market. It is also rumored to be considering giving up 430,000 sf at 181 Fremont St. in San Francisco. Pinterest giving up a chunk of their San Francisco office space. Salesforce just this week considering giving up more space in San…Read More→

Bisnow October 27, 2022 reported “Dave Welner, chief financial officer of the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other platforms, said on its third-quarter earnings call Wednesday that Meta expects to lose roughly $2B from its cutback on office leases this year.”. Then today Meta said it was slashing 11,000 jobs.  Lyft is trying…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→

On a national level, the Colliers Q2  2022 U.S. Research Report reported that net absorption was positive for the third time in the past four quarters. Asking rents are holding firm but ‘generous concessions are on offer’. Sublease space is at record levels, now totaling 218 million square feet. Locally there is good news and…Read More→

  Elon Musk asked all his Tesla employees “to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week’ and those that didn’t do so would be fired.  Then yesterday Apple leased 382,484 square feet of office space at Mathilda Commons, 625/655 North Mathilda Avenue in Sunnyvale. Pure Storage today sublet 330,000 sf of plug…Read More→

Bisnow reported on May 25, 2022 “the demand for office space across the country fell 1.5% in April compared to March….Almost half of office visits in 2022 to date were just once a week, Bloomberg reported, citing workplace occupancy data company Basking.io, which aggregates WiFi data from 100 offices of seven organizations across a variety…Read More→

  San Francisco’s office vacancy rate went from4% in early 2020 to 24% in April 2022, with leasing coming almost to a standstill combines with a number of companies giving back space. Not surprisingly, this has placed millions of feet of planned office projects on hold. Right now there are about 17 million feet of…Read More→

A number of wonderful announcements about our commercial real estate markets. First, here in the San Francisco Bay Area Ripple just leased 130,000 square feet of office space at 600 Battery St. in San Francisco. Applied Materials just subleased 246,000 square feet 1t 3333 Scott Blvd. in Santa Clara,  and on a national level, the…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→

There have been recent reports out that the national office sublease vacancy has decreased over the past several months. Cushman Wakefueld put a positive spin on this, which is welcome considering all the negative press the office market has had since Covid first struck, with the office availability going down from 146.3 million square feet…Read More→

  39% of Small Business Owners Said They Would Fire Employees Who Refuse to Come Back to the Office, and in the same survey 39% said they would not. In an article in the San Francisco Business Times July 8, 2021, Digital.com surveyed 1,500 small business owners. ‘But about 47% of business owners who say…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→

  Bisnow 5/12/21, I was surprised  by the following quote: “Real estate attorneys surveyed by Bloomberg Law are almost all predicting defaults in retail and hospitality properties in 2021, but they also predict that office properties will see a large share of defaults this year. Ninety-four percent of the respondents picked retail as one of…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→

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→

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→

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→

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→

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→

  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→

  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→

  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→

  Office subleases are hitting the markets bigtime, from New York to San Francisco, Boston, Houston and many other major markets. Millions of square feet of excess space, with millions more expected to follow. Companies are finding that they can not only survive with working from home, many are thriving, despite the absence of corporate…Read More→

According to SocketSite, which tracks the San Francisco rental market, year-over-year apartment rents were down 20S%. The Bay Area regional planning agency, The Metropolitan Transportation Commission, is considering a mandate that large Bay Area employers have 6-% of their work force permanently work from home. Reported in today’s  East Bay Times, ‘Significant increases in available…Read More→

A report just released by Colliers International on the top 25 US Metro Office Markets, show Atlanta on top with 2,055,717 sf of YTD positive net absorption, while New York (Manhattan) had a negative net absorption of 3,375248 sf and San Francisco had a negative net absorption of 3,004,410 sf. Other notables was Seattle with…Read More→

On the day Pinterest announced paying $89.5 million dollars to cancel a 490,000 square foot office lease they had previously signed for a project that was going to be built in San Francisco’s South of Market, due to a change of where employees would be located, developer Jay Paul announced it is going ahead with…Read More→

A number of regions are reporting an avalanche of new office sublease space. I was on an SIOR national broker call and my associate in Dallas, Texas said they had 4.6 million square feet of new office sublease space come on the market in just the past three months. She reported that in one day…Read More→

There have been a number of reports, both regionally as well as nationally, that predict corporations will begin leasing suburban office space to accomplish several goals. First, they need to increase employee separation during the pandemic, and it is much cheaper to lease space in the suburbs to accomplish this. Secondly, companies that are above…Read More→

San Francisco has over 4.5 million square feet of available office space for sublease, and some brokers are predicting that this may cause direct office space rents to drop by as much as 10-20%. The Covid-19 is not the only reason for this spike in available space. There were a number of new office projects…Read More→

In National Real Estate Investor June 2020 Elaine Misonzhnik writes on page 3, “The virus might be with us indefinitely. (The World Health Organization has predicted it might take up to five years to get it under control.) And to declare the end of cities, decide that everyone should work and learn from home permanently…Read More→