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→

According to the East Bay Times, “At least 1 in 5 residents in high-priced cities say they have already moved or expect to – a possible harbinger of significant change in the Bay Area. This is the biggest, fastest transformation of how we work since World War II” said Adam Ozemik, chief economist at Upwork….Read More→

At a recent SIOR National Conference I heard of Amazon 3-5 story 70’ clear warehouses, 3-story warehouses for high-valued land, last mile, using steel supports and costing three times the normal cost of a warehouse, and one of the largest warehouse developers in the world said we had a demand for 400 million square feet…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→

Rich Commercial Realty in Raleigh, North Carolina recently had a survey of thousands of their clients, vendors and contacts asking about the current usage of office space. 69% reported currently occupying their space, and those who hadn’t and asked when, 25% said the next three months, 13% said the next six months, and 62% weren’t…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→

It was expected by many in the office industry that with the pandemic now in its 6th month occupancy levels would be in the 25-50% range, but a number of national landlords report occupancy much lower. “Oxford Properties U.S. Head Office Chris Mundy said his firm had initially expected buildings would reach around 25% occupancy…Read More→

There has been a lot of hype on the world getting a vaccine in late 2020, or early 2021, after which life will hopefully return to normal. However the announcement by one of the smartest and largest corporations in the world, Google, that they will let employees work from home until at least July 2021…Read More→

www.bisnow.com reported today that New York City brokers do not feel very confident in the current and future state of the real estate market, and in a Real Estate Board of New York Broker Confidence report released yesterday averaged 1.94 out of 10 this quarter. “In their general written comments about the market, brokers cited…Read More→

I attended a webinar this week with office specialists from JLL, C&W, Cresa and Newmark Knight Frank, representing San Francisco, the Peninsula, the East Bay and Silicon Valley. In San Francisco for the most part when March hit, the world just stopped.  Nothing was happening, and tenants only did what they had to do. Along…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 an article today in GlobeSt.com, a recent survey by Gensler found that only 12% of workers want to work full-time from home and 70% said they want to spend most of their week in the office. “Meetings, socializing and impromptu face-to-face interactions with colleagues were ranked as the top reasons people wanted to head…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→

Reported in TechCrunch this past week: 63% of the startups surveyed by Founders Forum with Tech Crunch said they would re-open in 1-3 or 3-6 months, regardless of when the government told them it was safe to do so. A small number have re-opened their offices, 10% have closed their offices permanently and many said…Read More→

The Society of Office and Industrial Realtors (SIOR), of which I have been a proud member for over thirty years, interviews top brokers on a variety of issues and publishes these interviews. Neil Dailey, SIOR, office broker with McGraw Commercial Properties in Tulsa, Oklahoma, stated this about the new view of office buildings: “I also…Read More→

Nikkei Asian Review just reported that Fujitsu will cut their office space in Japan in half over the next three years. Teleworking will be made a standard practice, and Fujitsu has introduced a policy that will limit the number of employees in the office at any one time to just a quarter to its total….Read More→

Triple-net real estate investment owners often take a lower rate of return, sometimes in the 5-7% annual range, with increases every five years, long 20-30 year leases, credit tenants or strong franchises just to protect their investment. Many of these investments are absolute triple-net, which covers the owner.  If a hurricane tears down the building…Read More→

Real Capital Analytics, which tracks national commercial real estate sales, reported on June 25, 2020 that May sales volume was down 79% year over year.  Industrial was the best performer category (only down 70%), office volumes were down 82% and apartments were down 81%. Retail dropped 83%, and all of the above looked comparatively strong…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→

Published in the National Real Estate Investor January/February 2020, Jim Costello, SVP of Real Capital predicts industrial will continue growing at double digit rates, many investors and lenders will continue to hate retail, and suggests caution when taking on debt. ”There’s an ugliness of politics entering the investment process in the year ahead. We will…Read More→