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1/27/16
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A surging tech economy, some of the highest rates of leasing and pre-leasing ever recorded, a pipeline of under-construction projects so robust it’s near bursting, and an effective unemployment rate of zero during the final three months of the year and for the full year ended Dec. 31, 2015, are telegraphing to market observers that 2016 will mark the continuation of San Francisco’s “Glittering Age,” a period that has now spanned two years and for the first time has seen office rents in San Francisco surpass those in Manhattan, Colliers International has disclosed in its year-end office market research study.
Fueled by the unrelenting growth of the tech industry, the year ahead, like the year just concluded and the year before that, will be one of the most prolific and productive periods of office development in the city’s history and will be the cause of a historic, continental shift of the nation’s economic power center from East to West where an overwhelming majority of major tech companies are now based, including Apple, Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and so many more, the report noted.
“I cannot stress enough that this, truly, is San Francisco’s Glittering Age,” said Colliers’ Regional Executive Managing Director Alan Collenette. “This is an era, not a short-lived boom. For the relatively few of us who truly study and parse the sometimes obscure and subtle leading indicators that underlie the economics of the office space market, it is plain to see that this time it is different.
“What is different from prior boom and bust cycles like the so-called Dot Com Bubble and The Great Recession,” he continued, “is that the entire world economy has shifted to a knowledge-based economy, where innovation is the commodity. The world has chosen San Francisco as its capital city, and the rush of inbound, VC and inbound employees has built to a crescendo. Like Rome or Florence or London in their golden eras, San Francisco is the undisputed epicenter of the world’s knowledge-based economy. Worldwide serious technology companies today cannot not be in San Francisco.”
That’s why, for the first time in history, office rents are higher in San Francisco than they are in Manhattan and vacancies are much lower -- 7.2% for San Francisco versus 9.6% in Manhattan.
Meantime, sublease space, the traditional canary in the mineshaft for market health, stood at just 0.7% of San Francisco’s 90 msf office market at year-end, the report revealed. This compares with a high of 5.1% in the aftermath of the dot com bust of 2002 and 1.6% during the depths of The Great Recession in 2009. Sublease space is defined as surplus space offered for lease by tenants.
Additionally, unemployment in the Bay Area is 5% or less, a number that effectively equates to zero, according to the UCLA Anderson School of Management’s latest survey of the Bay Area. In San Francisco, the rate was even lower at 4%, according to federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. .Anyone who wants to work, can work, in the Bay Area, according to every academic and business study.
“There is much discussion here of the cost of housing, the cost of living, the shortage of office space and the dearth of employees,” said Collenette. “Despite these factors, yet still they come, this extraordinarily well-educated and motivated workforce who have, in many cases, fled the dreadful winters back east, or in the Midwest, left the parched cultural and geographic desert states of the southwestern U.S., or escaped hardscrabble lives in India and Asia, and are willing to work around any hurdles to get a piece of the action.”
Collenette noted that there is no meaningful pressure release valve, either, since even nearby Oakland, which made news recently by attracting Uber, cannot oblige because its office vacancy rate is 3.5%, it has no pipeline of housing, and new office buildings cannot be built due to economics.
“As I have often mentioned, we are the most discussed and most sought after office market in terms of vacancy rates, absorption levels and investment sales in the U.S. for a variety of reasons,” Collenette added, “all of which have conspired to create a ‘perfect storm’ in our office submarkets.”
Reflecting Collenette’s statement, according to the Colliers report, overall vacancy levels in the fourth quarter stood at a low 7.2%, rising higher than the 6.1% recorded in the third quarter, but were skewed due to the completion of four major pre-leased but not-yet-occupied office properties coming on the market. In figuring the vacancy rates for any given market, the brokerage firm counts only occupied, not pre-leased, buildings.
Those four buildings – 350 Mission Street, 222 Second Street, 333 Brannan Street and 345 Brannan Street – delivered over 1.2 msf of new space to the market and are expected to be occupied in the first half of 2016, which will then force the vacancy levels back to the 7% or lower range, which for most major metropolitan areas is effectively a net-zero vacancy rate. When that happens, the market will tighten its ranking as one of the strongest in the nation, the report noted, and will be far below the “10 percent tipping point” that would signal a balanced market.
“When compared to other urban office markets around the West and the entire country, San Francisco is the healthiest office market in the nation, pushed largely by the creative office space requirements of high-tech companies,” said Collenette. “When you have tenants like Apple, Salesforce, Twitter, Google, AirBnB, Pinterest and Udemy, to name only a handful, eating up large blocks of space in the City, along with the law firms and other service-related companies affiliated with the high-tech industry, the overall market can be best described as a boom town in terms of office space. This is where most of the major tech firms want to be.”
To underscore the strength and diversity of the market, which had witnessed a profusion of tech firms filling empty office space this year and last, in the fourth quarter 2015, activity was dominated by firms that utilize technology to serve a client base in fashion, law, health care, and office suite rentals.
In some of the largest lease transactions of the fourth quarter, The Gap, the clothing and accessories retailer, renewed its lease, but downsized to 243k sf at 550 Terry Francois Blvd.; Stitch Fix, the online personal fashion shopping site, leased 95k sf at 1 Montgomery Street; Collective Health, an employer health-care consultancy, pre-leased the entire building of 53k sf at 85 Bluxome Street; and Under Armour, the national chain of high-performance sportswear retail outlets, relocated to 51.9k sf at 135 Townsend, Colliers reported.
““Ironically, I am sure that many visitors and others who have little, if any, knowledge of the city, still think of our conurbation as a quaint tourist mecca instead of the mega-metropolis it is and are ignorant of the fact that we have evolved into what is now ‘Ground Zero’ of the new knowledge-based tech economy,” Collenette said.
Two other notable lease transactions were Regus, the Luxembourg-based company that leases individual suites of offices on a temporary basis, which renewed for 43k sf at 1 Market Street and the law firm of Severson & Werson, with offices throughout the nation, leased 41.5k sf at 1 Embarcadero Center.
Absorption rates, meantime, or the amount of net space occupied , totaled a healthy 179.7k sf in the fourth quarter, the 22nd consecutive three-month period of positive net absorption, the reported noted. For the 12-month period ended Dec. 31, 2015, total absorption for the year was a healthy 1.57 msf.
“What this does not indicate, however, is the amount of space brought to market that was pre-leased but not yet occupied and the amount of new space that is in the pipeline for delivery in 2016, including some 637k sf slated for delivery in the first quarter of the new year,” Collenette said. “Overall, there is nearly 5 msf total now under construction with 36% of that pre-leased.”
According to the Colliers report, the South of Market (SOMA) submarket experienced the largest spike in absorption during the fourth quarter with a total of nearly 225k sf of newly occupied space. Major tenants occupying space there included Pinterest, with some 120k sf at 651 Brannan Street, followed by Udemy, which occupied nearly 40k sf at 600 Harrison Street, and AirBnB moving into 48k sf of expansion space at 888 Brannan Street.
On the investment sales front, there were a total of 36 office sale transactions closed during the year for a combined value of nearly $3.7 bil. By comparison, during 2014, Colliers recorded 50 office sales for a total of $5 bil.
“This is above the historical averages of $2 bil to $3 bil seen in San Francisco over the last 16 years and we are chasing the historically strong years of 2007 and 2012, which had $9.8 bil and $6 bil in sales, respectively,” said Collenette.
With nearly 180k sf absorbed in the fourth quarter, the market has experienced nearly 1.6 msf of growth in 2015, the report noted. Class A assets continue to benefit from the large leasing volume in the market, accounting for approximately 100 percent of the positive absorption in the market year to date.
Meanwhile, overall weighted Class B rents increased in the fourth quarter by 3.9 percent, to $73.26 per square foot. Weighted Class B rents have surged by 53 percent over the past two years.
“Despite many large tenant requirements being filled this past year, demand in this market continues to remain strong with over 5.8 msf of office space in play among 156 tenants,” said Collenette.
“If all of these tenants’ requirements were met, this would equate to a net absorption of over 2 msf. While the likelihood that 100 percent of these tenants will secure their stated space requirements is doubtful, this does provide an indicator that there will be robust leasing activity well into 2016 and, perhaps, beyond.”
While overall weighted rental rates for Class A assets reflected an increase for the quarter, annualized rents are up 11.8 percent, Colliers disclosed. Leasing activity continued to be strong during the fourth quarter with nearly 1.2 million square feet of gross leasing volume. The San Francisco market experienced 13 leases over 100k sf closed in 2012 and recorded 14 leases totaling over 100k sf in 2014.
For the year 2015, the report noted, the City experienced a strong year of leasing activity with nearly 6.3 msf leased. In terms of transactions sized larger than 100k sf, in 2015 the city recorded 13 such transactions greater than 100k sf with over half of those completed in the first half of the past year.
Most notable among these was Stripe leasing 300k sf at 510 Townsend Street, JP Morgan renewing 201k sf at 560 Mission Street and The Gap’s renewal and downsizing of 243.1k sf at 550 Terry Francois Boulevard.
Prices continue to rise for both Class A and Class B assets. Class A prices rose to $675 per square foot in 2015 compared to the $615 one year ago. Class B prices per square foot also rose to $573 in 2015, compared to $508 in 2014.
The notable Class A sale that closed during the fourth quarter of 2015 was Tishman Speyer paying $378.5 mil for the 546.2k sf building at 333 Bush Street, Notable Class B sales included a $25 mil purchase by Market Street Capital of the 47k sf building at 1340-1370 Mission Street, or $552 per square foot; and Workday’s acquisition of a 34.5k sf office property at 2650 Eighteenth Street for $14.25 mil, or $413per square foot.
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