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→

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→

  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→

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→

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→

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→

  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→

  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→

Bloomberg News reported September 25, 2020 that Deutsche Bank AG is considering a hybrid model of allowing staff to split work between office and home, although a Morgan Chase spokesperson warned that staff productivity might slip if they work remotely too long, and a UBS Group spokesperson commented that working from home makes it harder…Read More→

  A report just out by the California Economic Forecast predicts more doom and gloom than I would have liked to have read. “The economy however is not back to the pre-crisis status. During most of Calendar 2020 and in much of the first half of 2021, ongoing economic restrictions will have resulted in millions…Read More→

  Something for employers to caution employees who are thinking of moving to a lower-cost state but continuing to work remotely. In an article in the New York Times, there are some states that will tax your income based on where you did the work, and others based on your residence, and it is possible…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→

San Francisco now has an estimated 6.5 million square feet of office sublease space. Direct Class A rents are still among the highest in the country, averaging $84 an annual square foot, but Class B rates are now in the $50-60/rsf range. In the Bay Area several companies have announced they will relocate their headquarters…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→

I have been reading more and more about folks paying astronomical rents (ie $5-6,000 for a two-bedroom in SF) or crazy-high home prices (median home price in San Francisco $1.3 million) packing up and heading to Lake Tahoe, to Austin Texas, and other regions. I have associates who moved to remote areas of California where…Read More→

First off, I am in no way an expert in this but just an office broker who has spent many decades representing office tenants in their space needs. However, I have been doing a lot of reading and researching. If your building has openable windows, great, let the outside fresh air in. Most newer buildings…Read More→

In my morning paper the headline read “249 experts agree: Virus lingers in the air indoors”. This got me to thinking how safe are office spaces in today’s pandemic environment? Asia has been repopulating many of its corporate offices months before the U.S. and I couldn’t find any reports one way or the other. There…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→

To quote Michael Tannenbaum, CFO of BREX, “Think of the office as a perk what you offer…when you start to think of it has a perk, you can start to say, are we getting the value out of this office relative to other things we can be offering?”.  I have to totally disagree with this…Read More→

If you are an office user evaluating different office buildings and want a quick way to see how the building is maintained, check out the restrooms and stairwells in smaller Class A and all sizes in Class B office buildings as this is where spider webs, dirty floors, and lack of dusting can show up. …Read More→

What are the hours of HVAC’s operation? (heating and air conditioning) What is the after-hours HVAC charge? What are the rent escalations, if any, after the first year? How much tenant improvement dollars do I get? (paint + carpet = $3-5 per square foot, private offices cost $5,000 each.) How do you handle operating expense…Read More→

Suggested Timeline For an Office Move Timeline Office Moving Checklist Checklist Take the Misery Out of Moving Click here for article Business Relocation Checklist Click here for article

Office tenant improvement contractors are experiencing significantly longer lead times for materials such as doors, glass and other building components that need to be manufactured. For example, instead of a five-day lead time, two weeks might be necessary. Along with this delay factor many cities are utilizing outside plan checkers that may make more comments…Read More→

by Odette Pollar Time Management Systems Question: I am going to start a business from my home, but I am worried about being taken seriously by my customers. Answer: More and more people are working from home and hence it does not carry the same stigma it once did. Before going “official”, particularly in a condominium…Read More→

This list is not intended to be comprehensive. These terms may not be widely used in everyday conversation but are an important part of the office leasing vocabulary. Above-Standard TI’s: Above-standard TI’s (Tenant Improvements) may include items such as upgraded carpet, wallpaper instead of standard paint, side-glass next to office doors, special light fixtures, etc….Read More→

“I’d like to spend just a few minutes on an overview of this morning’s topic before introducing our distinguished panelists and getting into the heart of the program. Until recently, it’s been a tenant’s market, and how many of us, before, in a market with 30% vacancy through skillful and astute negotiations were able to…Read More→

There are several things you should know to make this major project go as smoothly as possible. Relocating a small business, even a two-person office, is a time-consuming job that requires careful planning. Although many people who have had to move would hesitate to wish such a fate on their worst enemies, much can be…Read More→

Three key tenant complaints when their office building gets totally full of tenants: 1) If on-site parking, it can get more difficult to find a space and you begin to notice the compact cars that park in the full-size spaces 2) Landlords usually start jacking up rental rates 3) There may be longer waits for…Read More→