You can use well water, non-potable water, or recycled water, and starting January 1, 2027, state and local government properties and public agencies are prohibited from watering grass at their properties with potable water. Sports fields, parks, and cemeteries are exempt. Starting January 1, 2028 commercial, industrial, and institutional properties are included and January 1,…Read More→

San Francisco’s office market continues to roll along, with the vacancy rate dropping to 25% (I remember not too long ago when it was a reportedly 32%) with 3.7 million square feet of net absorption so far in 2026. Meanwhile across the Bay Block has just placed 361,000 square feet of office space on the…Read More→

In a 10/28/26 article by Chloe Gallivan in Bisnow, “The use of artificial intelligence is driving the world’s largest companies to reassess their workforce — and workspace — in the pursuit of efficiency. The technology is reshaping how employees work and collaborate, prompting employers to reevaluate their office layouts to promote more integrated workspaces, workplace…Read More→

I’ve been gone for most of the month, taking an amazing vacation in Thailand and Vietnam, but still thinking of all the blogs I would have to write to catch up. There are many positive aspects to the San Francisco Bay Area office market, with Silicon Valley reporting 10 million square feet of office absorption…Read More→

  Move-in prime view space vacancy even lower at 2.8%, while the overall vacancy rate for San Francisco office space is 28%, way down from when it was 35% just a few years ago. Overall for all classes of office space there are currently almost 28 million square feet of vacant space, 27.8 million out…Read More→

A Major Office Leasing Dichotomy   On the one hand, office tenant improvement costs have gone through the roof, and at least here in the San Francisco Bay Area Region budgets of $40-80/rsf are common, which can cause great angst with landlords trying to justify making the deal. Amortizing the tenant improvements over a longer-term…Read More→

  Two articles in the same day crossed my desk. Visa is cutting 7% of its employees in efficiency push as AI reshapes work. “Visa joins a growing list of companies that have cited AI as a key factor in recent layoffs, including Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, Cisco, Cloudflare, PayPal, Atlassian, and Standard Chartered.” Business Today 8/12/26…Read More→

“U.S. office leasing volume achieved its strongest first half since 2019, driven by 66.1 million feet of leasing activity in the second quarter alone-roughly 13% over 2025. Demand is heavily concentrated in top-tier and AI-driven tech sectors, giving landlords increased pricing power as new construction remains low” Bisnow August 5, 2026, Some of the drivers…Read More→

Big Tech leasing dominates the Bay Area — Google renews 2.1MM SQFT across Moffett Place and Moffett Gateway in Sunnyvale, Amazon takes the entire 317,000 SQFT Moffett Towers building backfilling Google’s exit, Apple leases 125,800 SQFT from Peery Arrillaga, and Brex leases the full 200,000 SQFT at 270 Brannan Street in San Francisco.”  The Registry…Read More→

Once one of the shining industry stars of the Northern California commercial real estate markets, the biotech/life science market is struggling to find and keep tenants. With a vacancy rate in excess of 26% and a recent planned 700,000 square foot lab campus selling for half of what it was worth in 2019, there is…Read More→

  In my personal experience succussfully subleasing hundreds of thousnds of feet of office space, in generral subleasing can be a challenge. You often don’t have a full five-year term to offer, here are usually limiited or no tenant improvement dollars available so the subtenant must take the space as-is, the terms of the Master-lease…Read More→

As I check out East Bay office buildings, I am still seeing many sparsely occupied parking lots…especially Mondays and Fridays but surprisingly, also mid-week.” In May 2026, data from WFH Research showed that about 28% of paid days were done from home in the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland metro area. That number is almost exactly the same as…Read More→

This is just my opinion and I finish my 50th year specializing in the leasing and selling of Eastbay commercial real estate. I’ve been through a number of transitions, when the market either goes up or down, and I still remember in my early days when the office vacancy rate in San Francisco was less…Read More→

“The growth of artificial intelligence and changes in working practices mean businesses are also more susceptible to change”.  As soon as office occupiers get into their space they may find it doesn’t operate the way they thought on paper. One solution is to use modular offices and meeting rooms instead of traditional hard-walled construction. “These are the…Read More→

The past almost-four months of the Iran war has injected some amount of business uncertainty into the commercial real estate arena. While we are in no way out of the woods yet, if this cease fire holds and both sides work torwards a mutually-benificial resololution  the war has had and will continue to have an…Read More→

I think it depends on the type of individual, type of job function and a lot of other factors.. If I had to commute tone or wo hours each way to get to my office I would be depressed regardless. “Remote work has soared in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic. But, a new study suggests…Read More→

  If  I had relocated my home during Covid and have been working from home ever snce, and now was being forced to commute one or two hours a day each way to get to the office, how happy would I be? he Union of State Attorneys is claiming that forcing these employees back to…Read More→

Published in the Spring 2026 SIOR Report, various SIOR brokers shared what they viewed what makes a successful office building….”a best-in-class amenity experience…such an experience might include bars, saunas, pickleball courts, treadmill desks, cold plunges, banquet seating, laundry services and wellness rooms.” “Amenities are no longer a luxury. They’re a necessity and standard.” Another broker…Read More→

Headlines in the May 21, 2026, SF Registry read “San Francisco captures 80% of all U.S. AI Venture Capital of Office Leasing Snaps Back”, ‘Ai companies have leased 10.6 million square feet of office space in the city since 2019, more than any other market in the world”.   However, the San Francisco office vacancy is…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 Registry reported that Newmark has identified 390 active requrements totaling 9 million square feet of San Francisco office demand. Half of this is AI. In one of my recent blogs, I reported that real estate consulting firm VTS predict if AI companies will lease 13 million square feet of office space in San…Read More→

Bisnow March 4, 2026 Amazon is planning to cut 49,000 desks from its office footprint in perhaps the biggest shift in its real estate strategy since it courted offers from cities and states for a second headquarters in 2017. Management told members of Amazon’s global real estate and facilities group on Feb. 3 that the company aims to…Read More→

A few weeks ago, Anthropic leased 400,000 sf of office space in San Francisco, and this week OpenAI did a ten-year lease for 439,000 sf in Mountain View a 350 and 380 Ellis Street. Then on March 1, 2026, Bay Area News Group said this: “Nearly 410,000 jobs in the region (our Bay Area region)…Read More→

SF Business Times 1/20/26 “The tech industry’s embrace of stricter return-to-office policies will help fuel a 15% increase in San Francisco office leasing this year, real estate software company VTS said. The city’s fast-growing AI companies also will help ease almost 13 million square feet of San Francisco office space this year, VTS predicted.” I…Read More→

First, Anthropic just leased 480,000 square feet of Class A office space at 300 Howard Street in downtown San Francisco for a 13-year lease term. Next, Roblox leased 325,000 square feet at San Mateo’s Bay Meadows and will have a total of 1 million square feet of office space. Thirdly, Tiger Global Management just signed…Read More→

Not sure of the dicotimy but the SF Business Times headlins 1/16/26 read “Signs of Promise for Oakland’s Office Market” and the subheading rea “Vacancy Rises but Net Absorption Drops in Optimistic Signal”…Where I grew up when the vacancy rate rises and net absorption drops, this is the opposite of any positive signs…then in today’s…Read More→

East Bay Times 1/28/26  “Pinterest plans to lay off under 15% of its workforce, as part of broader restructuring that arrives as the image-sharing platform pivots more of its money to artificial intelligence. Beyond the coming layoffs, Pinterest said it will reduce office space. isn’t the first company to turn to job cuts while pivoting…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→

Basically, there has been little news over the past month. AI continues to lease space in San Francisco, tech companies have been purchasing  office buildings in Silicon Valley, foreclosures and discounted commercial property debt continue, there is a lot of capital looking for solid investments, the $1-5 million dollar mom & pop retail and warehouse…Read More→

Yes, it is apples and watermelons, so this blog does not intend to compare one commercial sale with another, but only to point out we are seeing interesting pricing differentials depending on where in the Bay Area, what type of property and who the buyer is. As an example, Apple just paid$216 million, or  $811/sf…Read More→

There has been so much positive news about new lease signings, some of them very signficant, and mostly fueled by the AI explosion which fortunately has been centered in San Francisco. Billions of dollars in new fundings and millions of feet of office space leased during the past year by this one industry category. However,…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→

According to a recent article by George Avalos in the East Bay Times, “An estimated 60% of the workforce physically located at Bishop Ranch has returned to the campus…by comparison, the turn-to-office rate was 49% for Silicon Valley and 41.8% for San Francisco, according to figures produced by Kastel Access Control System. Workers also appear…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→

Databricks is looking for 200,000 sf in Sunnyvale, another AI company making the news. Neuralink just took 144,000 sf at 499 Forbes Blvd. in South San Francisco. Pump.co leased 36,000 sf at 455 Market Street, AI Startup Abridge leased 80,000 sf at 208 Utah St., Anthropic took 104,000sf at Foundry Square III, Resolve I leased…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→

About to close escrow, according to TheRegistry-9/18/25, 201 California Street, San Francisco, a 272,000 square foot office property which was purchased in December 2019 for $239 million, $878/sf, may be going now for$57 million, $250/sf and a 75% discount…

According to Derek Daniels, Regional Research Director for Colliers International, “In terms of the latest on tenant touring demand, “There are close to 7 million square feet of active office tenant requirements in San Francisco. This includes large blocks requirements seeking to expand. Ai and related industries are driving growth in the San Francisco office…Read More→

I recently attended a presentation by Ken Larson, President of  Blueline Associates, Inc., a commercial construction company based in Pleasanton in business for over thirty years. I had asked Ken to address how we real estate brokers can assist our clients, both from the tenant as well as landlord side, in keeping tenant improvement costs…Read More→

I have been hearing the rumors for several months, and there is still no official confirmation but yet another Class A major office complex out in the suburbs of San Ramon, California may be headed for demolition. I tried to tour an office client through 2000 Canyon Place which has a twin to tallying 320,000…Read More→

When one or more sectors of the commercial real estate market head down, there are still positive sales and leasing occurring while the market heads into a slump.   The same phenomenon occurs when the market begins to improve. It isn’t like someone hits the switch and viola; we now have a healthy office (or other…Read More→

East Bay Times reporter George Avalos cited statistics from Cushman Wakefield that San Jose’s vacancy rate is 28.9%, improving from 30.9% during the first quarter, while Downtown Oakland’s office vacancy is at 37.2% and San Francisco at 34.8%…ouch ouch and ouch!  Meanwhile in San Ramon the Canyon Place, a four-building office complex is now slated…Read More→

According to articles from CBS and Sacramento Bee (8/12/25), “A new audit found that the State of California could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year by not enforcing return-to-office orders for state workers. The audit comes amid the saga for state workers and the political debate between remote versus in-person work. It found that…Read More→

“In 2025, twenty percent of $4.8 trillion of outstanding commercial mortgages held by lenders and investors will mature, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Among loans backed by industrial properties, 22 percent will come due in 2025, as will 24 percent of office loans. In recent years, lenders have allowed extensions when loans come due,…Read More→