Bisnow Jan. 23, 2022 reported national office occupancy rates, which had risen to 39% in November, 2022, is slowly back on the rise and now averages 36%.  However, the demand for office space has stalled and is at 58% of pre-pandemic levels. It had hit 87% in August 2021 when we thought we were out…Read More→

GlobeSt.com 1/22/22 reported that new office building construction was getting a 65% rent premium over average Class A rents, according to a study just out by Cushman & Wakefield. Peter Curry, real estate partner with Farrell Fritz, told GlobeSt that “front and center will be state-of-the-art air filtration systems, energy savings infrastructure, and a retreat…Read More→

  There appears to be a number of apps out that can allow employees to upload their e vaccination status, employment information that then allows a touchless building access through the lobby without having to check in with security. These apps allow you to control the elevator to get you to your specific floor, and…Read More→

This is the highest it has been in 20 years. Even though net absorption is down, rental rates have only dropped 10-15% since the beginning of the pandemic. Landlords are holding firm on their asking rents, although there are still concessions in the form of free rent and tenant improvement allowances. John Bryant, CEO of…Read More→

Wells Fargo just announced that March 14, 2022 is now the magic day when employees can return to the office under a ‘hybrid flexible work model’ and that if they want they can come back earlier, starting this Wednesday. They reminded workers that almost 100,000 workers never left the workplace or have already returned, out…Read More→

Carter Kennedy, one of Colliers top Occupier Services gurus in our San Francisco office, sent me a report on their market. On the one hand, Multi-tenant Class A Trophy office buildings are doing quite well with a vacancy rate of only 4.4%. Many are net leased to strong credit companies. On the other hand, Multi-tenant…Read More→

An article in the San Francisco Business Times today listed the three main factors impacting the return to the office. #1, Covid uncertainty…companies have announced, tehn cancelled, then announced again only to cancel again plans to bring employees back to the office. “Experts say they fully expect additional variants to follow Omicron, which is keeping…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→

#SIORDeloitte just came out with a CEO Survey that found CEOs expect one-third of their workforce to continue working from him in January 2022 and anticipate needed 26% less office space in 2022, compared to 2019 levels. In pre-Covid for the most part most employees were expected to come into the office every day, but…Read More→

  Ron Miller wrote a recent article comparing the major tech giants and how they planned to have their employees work moving forward. For the most part, Google, Apple, Salesforce, Microsoft and Amazon appear to be offering their employees a variety of hybrid work models, depending on the specific tasks the employee is handling. Most…Read More→

Bisnow reported today on a Stanford and Hoover Institution working paper titled ‘Why Working From Home Will Stick’ ‘that the amount of work undertaken from home in the U.S. will rise from about 5% before the pandemic to about 20% after the pandemic. They surveyed 30,000 U.S. workers multiple times and asked them to report…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→

There is a report out today from the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics that predicts due to the post-pandemic work-from-home shift there will be a potential impact on downtowns and retail that formerly relied on office workers as their customers. Just think, even if employees were allowed to work from home just…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→

The San Francisco Business Times May 13, 2021 reported on a survey taking by Blind, an anonymous professional network, who asked over 3,000 employees if they would rather work from home permanently or get a $30,000 raise and 64% said they would rather work from home.  Employees of two companies  would take the cash over…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→

The Bay Area Council surveyed 1,000 voters and 47% said they might leave the bay Area over the next few years. Of that group, 88% said they would leave California, The respondents citing high taxes, the high cost of living and housing costs doubled over the past few years. Texas, Arizona and New Mexico were…Read More→

According to the San Francisco Business Times April 30, 2021, Austin, Texas averaged a 30.8% office occupancy rate while San Francisco had a 12.2% office occupancy rate during the pandemic. There may be several reasons for this, including Texas’s much looser restrictions during the pandemic and in Austin many employees drive to work. In San…Read More→

One of the country’s largest owner of office buildings is Boston Properties, and today they announced that this Labor Day, September 6, 2021 will mark the official day when the office market will  turn around. Boston Properties has 195 properties with more than 51 million square feet, and it is ready to take advantage of…Read More→

Bisnow April 20, 2021  Survey by Savills reports “Seventy-three percent of the respondent companies said that their employees will be in centralized offices at least three days a week, while very few (4%) expect all their workers to be required to show up in person five days a week. A vast majority of companies (79%) are…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→

The highways in the Bay Area seemed to be back to grid-lock during commute periods, and part of this can be attributed to workers avoiding public transportation and driving to work. As of April 21, 2021 Bart ridership was down 86% from its baseline. Out in the suburbs the majority of office building parking lots…Read More→

In today’s East Bay Times a recent poll of Bay Area residents concluded that 20% of those surveyed felt working in the office was ‘very unsafe’ and 33% felt it was ‘somewhat unsafe’ in a poll of 1,000 registered voters for the Bay Area Council.  This means more than half polled  did not feel safe…Read More→

Remember after a major earthquake we stock up on bottled water, battery-operated radios, freeze-dried food, and other necessities if we were shut off from civilization until the highways and bridges were fixed? Now we have major Covid-19 sanitization, consultants advising office building owners to invest in self-opening doors, touchless elevator controls, and temperature checking stations…Read More→

Gensler, the largest architectural firm in the United States with a roster of some of the world’s largest corporate clients, has been studying the future of office space design. Outdoor spaces will be utilized for meeting areas, on rooftops, courtyards and nearby public areas. Safety for the employee will be forefront as the pandemic winds…Read More→

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→

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→

According to George Avalos, business reporter for the East Bay Times, “California’s job market should outpace the nation’s employment performance during 2021 – but remain two years away from climbing  back to the record job totals the state reached in early 2020” according to the UCLA Anderson Forecast just out. Also, the report cast doubt…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→

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→

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→

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area a number of tech companies have recently announced that large portions or in some cases, all of their office facilities are on the sublease market. Work-from-home is here to stay for many reasons and this does not bode well for the overall health of the office market. However,…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→

  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→

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→

In 2020 Austin, Texas saw a 5.8% year-over-year job growth, Boise Idaho enjoyed a 2.9% growth, Dallas 2.8%; Seattle 2.35; Denver 1.7% and Nashville 1.2%, which on the other side of this equation San Francisco and San Jose each lost 2.6% of their jobs in the finance, information and professional services catagories…I’ve heard stories of…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→

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→