Having been through a number of economic booms and then downturns I like to be alert to early warning signs of an impending office slow-down in one of the hottest office markets in the US, San Francisco. We don’t have to worry about a suburban slow-down as Contra Costa and the Tri-Valley never took off…Read More→

According to a new 2019 National Office Absorption report just out by CoStar, net absorption is down 26% Midwest, 18% South, 9% in the West, but up 2% in the Northeast. No reasons for this given perhaps continued increases in productivity, corporate downsizing and offshoring/outsourcing?  Here in the Bay Area, especially San Francisco, companies are…Read More→

San Francisco may finally begin to run out of office space as there are more than 8.1 million square feet of office space being proposed, but with the office cap on new construction of 2.1 million square feet, there finally may be an exodus to the East Bay!  Along the I-680 and Tri-Valley we have…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→

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→

Recently Facebook signed a lease in San Francisco for 750,000 square feet. This week it was reported that Facebook also signed a lease in Sunnyvale at Moffett Towers II for one million square feet! Industry experts are concerned that we might run out of office space. However, out here in the Eastbay the I-680 Corridor…Read More→

I’ve been giving speeches at various organizations, forecasting the market, where we are headed, if we are in a bubble (or two), and in my presentation I mention Facebook’s lease last month of the last available office building in San Francisco, taking all 750,000 sf, then, a few weeks later, leasing one million square feet…Read More→

A recent quote by Fiona Grandi, National leader of strategic investments with the big CPA firm KPMG caused me to think, how will this impact our future office space demand? “Five years ago the big push was to go paperless. Today the push is to be automated.” When we went paperless we needed a lot…Read More→

A few weeks ago, I gave a Forecast 2017 presentation at Scott’s Walnut Creek restaurant. Bottom line is we are in a great shape for the most part, with the San Francisco office market still robust. Annual full-service rents range is from $75 to $110/square foot, and tech sublease space gets snatched up by other…Read More→