San Francisco Office Vacancy Rate Eclipses Financial-Crisis High
› More sublease space is available now than during dot-com bust
› Months of remote work has companies reevaluating office needs
January 12, 2021 | Noah Buhayar | Bloomberg
San Francisco’s office market is being hit so hard by the pandemic that, by some measures, it’s worse than the global financial crisis or dot-com collapse.
The city’s office-vacancy rate reached 16.7% at the end of 2020, up 11 percentage points from a year prior, according to a report from commercial real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. That’s a higher level than in the aftermath of the 2008 recession.
The vacancy rate is being driven by a record amount of sublease space, which has surpassed the worst of the dot-com bust two decades ago, said Robert Sammons, senior director of research at Cushman in San Francisco. In addition, new leasing has effectively been on pause and hit the lowest annual level in 2020 since at least the early 1990s.
