In 2003 SF office vacancy rate exceeded 20% with 17 million square feet available. This 12 million is smaller in absolute and relative terms (about 14%).
Hard to imagine that the US is not massively over-supplied with office space right now
Easy to imagine, since it's been in every newspaper almost every single day for the last two years. Last i checked, SFO had something like 30% office occupancy rate.
Where i live, landlords are paying the few remaining tenants in some skyscrapers to move into other skyscrapers to concentrate the remaining offices in fewer buildings so that the other towers can be shut down and mothballed, or turned into apartments.
On the other hand, a 300,000 square foot office in SF can probably be easily be converted to about 30,000 studios and rented out for a cool 3 billion a month.
The rent for office space is around $75 dollars a square foot per year in SF. So, and 18 by 18 office space will run you about 25K a year. That's a pretty big office, but we still have to put up the walls and the door.
Let's see, a search turns up "price per square foot for office space in San Francisco reached $72.26 in the fourth quarter of 2015". (Per year, right?) Say a small private office takes 200 ft.^2 more than your share of a cattle pen would -- by my memory of Xerox PARC, many of the researchers' offices were smaller than that in total. Extrapolate to $100/ft^2 in the future and it's still $20k, a fraction of your salary. (If it's a monthly figure, than yeah, you need to move out of SF.)
As someone who's recently been back on the market for office space, I find it enlightening as to how much of the revenue and/or funding for a company has to go for rents in SF. $58/SF is massive. Imagine a small startup that needs 1k SQFT, pre-revenue paying nearly $5k a month on rent. Not to mention, that's probably pre-triple-net load...
I was balking at the $30/SF Class-A rents in my city, and even grumbling that perfect space for us was running $18/ft, because I had to get larger units (2500 SQFT+). Puts it all in perspective =)
The rent for office space is around $75 dollars a square foot per year in SF.
Oopsie, forgot we're talking about SF here. Haven't looked at Seattle-area office space in a while, but I'm willing to bet it's nowhere near $75/sq. ft.
For those that are not familiar with commercial rental quotes, they are stated in units of $/sq ft/year. A good rule of thumb is that you need about 200 sq ft per worker.
So, at $72/ft, your 10-person startup needs to spend $144,000 annually just for office space in SF.
Data point: we once rented 800 sqm and fitted in the order of 60 people. This was not as crammed as typical SF startup space (it was in Europe and a large corporation), we had groups of 6 and in between meeting rooms, bathrooms, pantry etc. So that‘s more in the order of 130 sq ft per employee. According to your numbers that would translate to $10k/employee
U.S. office vacancy rate fell to 16.6 percent in the first quarter from 16.7 in the fourth, the lowest since the third quarter of 2009
Washington D.C. remained the tightest market, with a vacancy rate of 9.3 percent. New York followed at 9.6 percent.
What happened at 6116 Executive Blvd in Rockville, MD is that the big fat Federal client moved even farther outside the beltway to new digs in Gaithersburg, Maryland (to another, newer office complex.)
New place is one of those "faux green" buildings where everything like the light switches, blinds, faucets and toilets don't work intuitively if they even work at all. They have to mow the roof so at least you can feel Eco-conscious as you flush 3 times.
Old place was close to Whole Foods and walkable to the metro(subway). New place is close to Subway(sandwich shop).
If the Washington Press wants to bemoan the old office space situation at NIH (National Institutes of Health), then they should ask about having NIH tear down the fortified walls they built around their beautiful Bethesda campus because of "9-11 terrorist threats". The old NIH used to look like a friendly college campus. Now it looks like a gated community with TSA style security theater.
Cost wise, seems feasible on a sqft basis (assuming a small office - cubicle equivalent). And I don't imagine the fit-out would be significant on a long lease.
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