BisNow April 27, 202,6 reported that the three largest office-to-residental markets are New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Chicago has a conversion pipeline of 5,000 units while Washington D.C. with the fourth-largest market for conversions had a 4,167 unit pipeline. The typical office conversion candidate is an older building with smaller floorplates in the core…Read More→

“Overall vacancy closed Q1 at 28.7%, marking the largest quarterly decline since Q3 2019. San Francisco recorded its largest quarterly net occupancy gain in more than six years.” Derrick Daniels, Regional Research Director for Colliers International shared with me his latest findings. Currently ter ear 227 companies looking for over 7,500,000 square feet of San…Read More→

I sometimes get swept up in the grand scheme of what AI is doing to make corporations and their processes more efficient, but I saw a recent quote that brought it closer to home for me. n The San Francisco Business Times April 16, 2026, quoting Wen Sang, Co-founder of Genspark AI which had two…Read More→

Headlines from just one page of the San Francisco Business Times April 16, 2026 read as follows: Harvey AI doubles Space in Headquarters; Howard Street is Site of Anthropic Leasing Spree; Large Office Tenants Circle San Francisco Market Again…it appears there are dozens of 100,000 sf plus office prospects currently looking for San Francisco office…Read More→

By Don Sweeney The Sacramento Bee    “They are not mostly fleeing to Texas, despite memes and advertisements touting it as an alternative to California. The top beneficiaries of Californians seeking their fortunes elsewhere are Nevada, Hawaii, Oregon, Arizona, Idaho and Washington, the study found. Other states benefiting from the California exodus include Colorado, Montana, Utah,…Read More→

I have a very good friend who runs an engineering and manufacturing company with less than 200 employees. He recently told me the deeper he gets into the new AI tools the more he is convinced that within the next six months he won’t need half of his current employees. This is in engineering, administration,…Read More→

Even with Ai companies taking down millions of square feet of San Francisco Class A office space, the 123 Mission Street office building in the financial District of San Francisco was purchased by Juul I June 2009 for $397 million, a hefty $1,093/sf, to accommodate the rapid growth of its vaping business. This 363,000 square…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→

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→

The San Francisco Business Times (1/9/25) reported that 6.8 million feet of San Francisco office space has been leased to AI companies! Wow! They also stated “Underused empty office buildings in the East Bay’s suburban markets are being eyed for residential developments in record numbers. So far, 1.3 million square feet of office space has…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→

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→

City, county and state governments…so these are captive users of office space, and right now there is an extended Prrime Day offce building sale going on where in many parts of the United States a government or non-profit entity can purchase a quality office building at a 70-80% discount. How come more municipalities aren’t doing…Read More→

David Amsterdam, President, Capital Markets for Colliers had a few noteworthy comments. “Office vacancies set another all-time high, though they are increasing at a more moderate pace.” Nice spin…’Supply-side pressure has all but shut down, setting the stage for recovery in the quarters ahead….Economic uncertainty has many occupiers in a wait-and-see holding pattern. The market…Read More→

I get caught up in my San Francisco East Bay region that I sometimes forget what is happening to our local office market may also be doing the same in other regions. The SF Business Times July 18, 2025, headlined “San Mateo’s Office Glut to Fuel Demolition Wave”, and describes how this 8 million square…Read More→

  June 10, 2025 I stuck my neck out and delcared that the officical ‘Bottom of the Office Market’ day…since then other corporations have added return-to-office mandates, but one of the strongest cases for the future return of the office was the announcement by Hines that they would like to build a 1,225 foot office…Read More→

You can go back to my newsletters and blogs over the past year, but I have repeated opinioned that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is allowing corporations to do more work with less employees. I haven’t seen any documented studies yet, but asreported in Techspot June 27, 2025, “Salesforce CEO says 50% of company work is now…Read More→

Lawrence Stone , Santa Clara County Assessor, Always Has Great Insights!   My favorite County Assessor in the entire Country has been Lawrence Stone, who is retiring from Santa Clara County Assessor after over three decades in this role and 47 years as a public servant. His Annual Report is superb, loaded with facts and…Read More→

The good news is that more people are coming to work in downtown San Francisco in 2025. “Office badge-swipe data compiled by the security company Kastle from select buildings in the San Francisco area continue to show weekly office-occupancy numbers compared to pre-COVID attendance being among the lowest of 10 metropolitan areas. For the week ending…Read More→

Bisnow May 29, 205, according to a CBRE report, “Artificial intelligence (AI) development likely will be a sizable driver of U.S. office demand over the next decade considering the impact it is already having on the country’s tech epicenter of San Francisco. AI-related companies have leased more than 5 million sq. ft. of San Francisco…Read More→

Just this week’s headlines….Machine Investment Group Acquires Distressed San Jose Luxury Condominium Development; Lener Takes Back 541-Room Signia by Hilton in San Jose Deal; Peninsula Land & Capital Buys 210,000 SQFT Class A Office Property in Walnut Creek for $22.5MM ($107/rsf, versus the $66 million-$314/sf)  the former owners paid for the property in 2017).  So…Read More→

SF Business Times May 9, 2025 “Remote job postings in San Francisco have plunged 71% over the past three years, as employers claim leverage and a new generation of AI companies dries a return to in-person work…The shift refkects a cooling labor market and a rising number of companies from Uber to JPmorganChase mandating office…Read More→

  45 Fremont Street, San Francisco, a 620,000 square foot Class A office property owned by Shorenstein and Blackstone, goes back to market at direction of  lender Bank of America. With a loan value of $347 million this puts the debt at $560/SF, which pre-covid would make sense but in today’s office sale market with…Read More→

  On the one hand we have the recent announcement that the 260,000 SF Pacific Plaza office building at 1340 Treat Blvd. in Walnut Creek, directly across the street from the Pleasant Hill Bart Station, Class A and mostly leased to credit tenants, but plans now underway to replace it with 400 housing units. On…Read More→

While I am all for positive news, especially when it comes to the office market, sometimes articles are done in a possibly misleading spin. TheRegistry on April 22, 2025, headlined “JPMorgan Chase Plans to Expand Lease at San Francisco/s 560 Mission t 280,000 SQFT”. The article starts as follows: ”JPMorgan Chase & Co. is doubling…Read More→

As reported in the Colliers U.S. Leading Office Markets Q1 2025 report, “Across the 14 gateway regions, 52.8% of the total construction pipeline is preleased. Of the 10.4  MSF of preleasing in active construction buildings (for leases over 50,000 SF in size), FIRE tenants committed to 61.2% of new space. Wells Fargo has preleased 1.2…Read More→

  In an article written by Joe Gose and published in the New York Times 4/14/25, sales of office buildings across the country are up 21% from 2023. CBRE reported that in 2024, 6.5 million ore square feet of office space was leased than was vacated. In major higher-cost cities the average asking rate of…Read More→

There was an announcement in TheRegistry that Google is putting over 1,000,000 square feet of office space on the market at Pacific Shores, Redwood City.  Yesterday there was a press release that Workday in Pleasanton was putting a 209,000 square foot office building on the market, vacant. A week ago I toured a Concord office…Read More→

Globest.com reported that the 3,165-unit apartment complex in San Francisco, Parkmerced, is in default after the owner, Maximus Real Estate Partners defaulted on a $1.5 billion dollar loan backed by the complex.  There have also been articles like one in the March 20, 2025 Business Times “Paramount wrote the value of its investment in the…Read More→

I’ve been predicting that the private industry and government mandates that office workers return to the office will boost occupancy from the current 50% to 60% but not bring back pre-Covid levels is being born out. BisNow reported on March 10, 2025, that the average office foot traffic is 64% of 2019 levels and average…Read More→

  Two years ago at our annual Northern California SIOR Chapter event at the San Francisco Ferry Building, where major industrial developers forecast what they think this industry segment will be doing over the next year…I remember a consistent comments that their pencils were put away and that new Bay Area industrial development for the…Read More→

I have been writing and publishing the OfficeTimes Corporate Office Perspective for the past 45 years, and during this time I have made many industry predictions. Almost every one of them has come true, and this is documented if you want to check. It almost feels like we are at the office building bottom, but…Read More→

  It took DOGE only six days to terminate 22 Federal leases. GSA oversees the federal government’s 360 million square feet of owned and leased properties.  Landlords with GSA as a tenant may be worried as many leases have early termination clauses. As reported in a January 18, 2018 Colliers Insights report, “Investors and lenders…Read More→

“The Trump administration is considering selling two-thirds of the Federal government’s office stock to the private sector, according to people familiar with the transition operations. About three-quarters of the 70 million square feet of office space GSA leases from private landlords in D.C. is also likely to be canceled.  The GSA has been working to…Read More→

6001 Shellmond St., Emeryville, a110,000 sf Class A eight-story office building with adjacent shopping and retail was purchased in 2017 for $33 million, and the $21.6 million loan was just purchased for $6.8 million last month. $300/sf before,$62/sf now…

Bisnow headline, The retail apocalypse is back, Why It Seems Like All Of America’s Chains Are closing, then I opened my Morning Brief, “Party City Out Of Business After Nearly 40 Years”,  and the next headline, “The Container Store Files For Bankruptcy”

GSA has 78 million sf of office leases either expiring or can be terminated by end of 2028. While there appears to be a push to get all government employees back in the office five-days a week, The American Federation of Government Employees union just reached a deal with GSA to protect and extend hybrid…Read More→

I was at a recent broker event with specialists from different commercial real estate segments. Here are some interesting insights from this…the housing market has slowed down; less folks are buying homes and that may have dramatically impacted a number of other industries. Our industrial folks say the construction companies are downsizing, giving up warehouse…Read More→

A double-default is when a real estate borrower has trouble with their loan, either it is due and they are unable o refinance, or they can’t make the payments, and they do a work-out with the lender. The terms are adjusted, or the loan is extended, or other loan modifications so the lender doesn’t have…Read More→

I attended our Fall SIOR National Conference in Los Angeles, and one of the sessions discussed how and why our country will experience increased energy shortfalls. One speaker said that a Chatgpt search uses 17 times more energy than a Google search, and we are seeing huge demand increases for data centers across the Country….Read More→

According to a recent report by JLL, nationwide lab space availability is now 30% and this is expected to rise further. “The report predicts rents will continue dropping and that it could take years before the local markets work through their supply backlogs.”  This is sobering as this segment of the industry was previously a…Read More→

Bisnow August 29, 2024, reported that 1 in 6 .S. office buildings are strong residential conversion candidates. On the one hand, it could be viewed as only 1 in 6, while a more optimistic slant would be 17% of U.S. office buildings may be residential conversion candidates.” Manhattan led U.S. markets with more than 53%…Read More→

There have been a number of estimates of the job displacement, current and future, due to AI (Artificial Intelligence) and yes, there will be some offset due to new job opportunities in Ai. “300 million jobs could be lost to AI…44% of companies using or planning on using AI believe it will result in layoffs…Read More→

  TMG Partners and Goldman Sachs gave back the office complex at 350-380 Ellis Street, Mountain View,  to the ender, KKR, and TMG will be staying on to help position the property for the next—generation workplace.  

Bisnow July 19, 2024, had a string of very positive commercial real estate headlines. At the top was “Goldman Sacs Reports Gains in Real Estate Investments’ and when I dug into the article, it turns out they got ahead of the curve last year and wrote off a ton of poor investments, and now they…Read More→