I will share articles, data, tweets, and everything in between each week that I want people interested in Bay Area real estate to read.
Flight-to-quality trend persists as companies compete for prime offices "Companies are finally feeling more confident about their real estate decisions nearly five years after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and their decisions are bolstering leasing activity in many markets. Industries that have largely been absent in office-leasing deals since 2019 also are starting to reemerge." (San Francisco Business Times)
Mission Bay isn’t the typical S.F. neighborhood, but it may be its most successful "Mission Bay lacks most of the qualities San Franciscans tend to celebrate in their neighborhoods…But, 20 years after UCSF opened its community center and student housing building, the neighborhood has emerged as one of San Francisco’s most successful redevelopment experiments…While sales tax receipts have plummeted across the city, they have skyrocketed in Mission Bay. While office buildings are nearly 40% vacant in most of downtown, Mission Bay’s commercial space is mostly full. While market-rate housing projects have mostly been put on hold since the pandemic, the Giants and Tishman Speyer have opened two new residential towers at Mission Rock, a mixed-use development that is also home to Visa’s headquarters and popular restaurants such as Che Fico." (San Francisco Chronicle)
Hearst buys 16-story office building in San Francisco for about $43M "Hearst has bought a 16-story office tower in San Francisco so it can temporarily close its century-old Chronicle newspaper office to revive a stalled condominium project in SoMa…The purchase of the tower will allow Hearst to temporarily relocate the Chronicle and SFGate out of the Chronicle Building at 901 MIssion Street,…That will allow the firm to launch the second phase of 5M, the $1 billion redevelopment of a 4-acre parcel of partially Hearst-owned land between Fifth, Mission and Howard streets in South of Market." (The Real Deal)
Office landlords bulk up with competitive tenant amenities "The growing trend reflects the disproportionate, post-pandemic demand for top-quality buildings, which have fared much better than buildings with fewer bells and whistles while The City’s overall office-vacancy rates last year rose to record highs before subsiding slightly…Even “trophy” buildings are adding amenities." (San Francisco Examiner)
Inside one developer’s audacious comeback plan for downtown Oakland "But one local developer stands out as it looks to turn a project in the heart of downtown into a reactivation point for a beleaguered neighborhood and make it a destination on its own. …Behring is marketing the bundle as an “urban campus” offering “extreme mixed-use” that will allow paying members to live, work, and play in one place. That’s the ad copy. What it means is that the developer is selling the building to multiple types of users rather than just apartment residents." (SF Standard)
