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.
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.
> In Mountain View, for example, the home of Google, the price of office space is more than two-and-a-half-times the national average: nearly $97 per square foot, versus just less than $35. In Palo Alto, the suburban enclave where Facebook was born, office rents top $88 per square foot, with a vacancy rate below 4 percent. Surprisingly, office rents in San Francisco, home of the $3,000 one-bedroom apartment, are low by comparison, coming in at $60 per square foot.
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.)
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.
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.
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 =)
Does office space for 7 employees in SF really cost ~10K/month? I know in midtown Manhattan a previous startup I was at had over 5K sq ft for that price.
I was curious about the actual cost of doing this.
Average annual rent $/sqft = $30 (US), $40 (Seattle), $70 (SF/NY) [1]
Average private office space: 196 sqft [2]
Average cubical: 90 sqft [2]
Price of upgrade: $3180 (US), $4240 (Seattle), $7420 (SF/NY)
Another way of looking at this is ~$2-4/hour.
This ignores that if you did actually give every developer an office, prices would increase due to lack of space. It also likely ignores a slew of other factors from the real world.
I think you would be surprised to what the ratio of office square foot to employee headcount looks like. Most modern offices are designed to 150-250 sf per employee including circulating space, common meeting rooms, kitchens, and washrooms.
Also, if what you say is correct, that office space is 10x suburban housing rent, that is most certainly an anomaly unique to your city. That would mean a high end market, like NY or SF with $100-$150 per square foot rents would have housing stock renting for $10-15 per square foot (these are annual numbers). That is not the case in any market I have ever encountered.
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.
https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/ca/sa...
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