“A search conducted in the US and UK shows the presence of surveillance cameras in urban settings caused a significant decrease in property crimes on the streets and in subway stations, and a decrease of 50 percent in parking lots.” Wired November 2019

“We’ve been debating for a couple of years about what impact new FASB rules would have on our business,” says Adam Kaduce, SIOR, a Senior Vice President at R+R Realty Group in West Des Moines (office leasing business). “Frankly, we’ve seen very little FASB related influence on how people are looking at real estate. It’s…Read More→

What, haven’t you heard about the Bay Area’s outrageous cost of housing and California’s crazy high tax structure? You could expand anywhere in the United States, go where the average price of a decent home is $250,000 or less, which might be just the down payment in the Bay Area! Then again, if you were…Read More→

I was just mailed a marketing piece from the California Madera County, Economic Development Commission, and a few interesting facts: In 1990 California’s population was only 29,950,000 and now it is 39,927,000, a 10 million growth in less than 30 years! No wonder our housing hasn’t caught up. The average home price in 2018 in…Read More→

Is the economic downturn on its way?  In the National Real Estate Investor, July, 2019 there were a number of different articles written by different authors but all pointing in the same direction for 2020 – down… Elaine Misonzhnik started it off on page 6, discussing industrial real estate “…while e-commerce growth will continue to…Read More→

First time since the Great Recession that I’ve heard multiple commercial real estate brokers broach the possibility of an upcoming real estate “crash”. In my opinion, crash is too harsh, but with rising interest rates, cap rates (price divided by net income) will also go up, resulting in property values going down. A number of…Read More→

Google has plans to build 5,000 homes on its Mountain View property and 9,850 housing units at its future North Bayshore property … “Live, work, play and stay”. Bishop Ranch plans to build 478 apartments within its business park. Facebook plans to build 1,500 housing units at its Willow Campus in Menlo Park. (The Registry,…Read More→

In my opinion, over time there will be a greater rent spread between newer, smarter office buildings as compared with class B and C “dumber” buildings. There will be a number of reasons for this increasingly larger rent differential. Modern Class A office buildings with state of the art building systems can run much more…Read More→

I am so glad we’re building new freeways and additional Transbay bridges and BART tunnels … NOT! Yet there is a huge push to build hundreds of thousands of new homes in the Bay Area to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of new tech jobs. In just one submarket, San Francisco’s Central South of Market…Read More→

“Of the Bay Area residents who are still here, nearly half of those surveyed recently said they plan to move out of the region in the next few years, according to a poll released in June by the Bay Area Council.” (Bay Area News Group, July 15, 2018) Folks are leaving in droves, selling their…Read More→

An excellent article by John Cumbelich, a retail-leasing specialist, who shares the sad news of regional malls and power centers. “… the regional mall, some 400 of which will fail in upcoming years. Another 400 will struggle, leaving only about 250 “fortress” malls that are expected to thrive. On the other hand, he cites Oakland,…Read More→

Canopy is opening a new shared workspace on Jackson Square, San Francisco. The 11,000 square-foot facility will be a “serene, distraction-free environment for up to 250 members to concentrate, connect and do their best work.” That ratio works out to 44 square feet per employee. If we imagine that everyone were to show up one…Read More→