commercial real estate san francisco | Calco Commercial, Inc.

Category: commercial real estate san francisco (65)

Sep

San Francisco CRE News: Technology Companies Continue To Drive Office Rents Up

CompStak: San Francisco Office Rents Continue Their Rise
Re-posted from: The Registry Bay Area Real Estate
By: Robert Carlsen
Date Posted: August 30, 2015

Many brokers, appraisers and developers have experienced San Francisco’s strong first half of the year in commercial real estate, with demand for office space continuing to outpace supply and office rents increasing across all building classes and submarkets.

While Class A and B buildings in San Francisco both had quiet starts to 2015, they recently picked up to close the first half of the year in the black, according to CompStak Exchange, a New York-based commercial real estate database specializing in lease comparables.

CompStak’s second quarter 2015 effective rent report said that Class A effective office rents in San Francisco were up 6.6 percent to $65.29 per square foot over the previous six months and Class B buildings performed even better, with effective rents increasing 12 percent to $59.40 per square foot over the same time period.

And with the tightness of available office space comes the absence of perks. “Landlords who also own property in markets outside of San Francisco know how favorable market conditions really are,” the report said. “Concessions given in San Francisco are far below comparable markets like Los Angeles, Manhattan and Washington, D.C.”

“For example, tenants in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles County receive, on average, twice as much in free rent and tenant-improvement dollars. The strength of the San Francisco leasing market is evident when viewed in this light.”

According to Blake Toline, a CompStak research analyst, most of the demand driving up prices in San Francisco is coming from technology companies, which has been a trend over the past few quarters. The north and south Financial Districts typically have more corporate tenants, such as law, finance and consulting firms, “but that is starting to change as space around the city becomes harder to find, forcing tech tenants that wouldn’t have normally looked at the central business district to sign space there,” he said.

CompStak said that Class B buildings offer space with more character, unique interiors with exposed brick, operable windows and open floor plans, which makes them more attractive to tech tenants.

Toline provided some recent submarket tenant rent increases over the past six months.

In the lower South of Market area, Class B space is up 3.8 percent to $67 per square foot. Recent lease deals in the region include Elance at 475 Brannan St., which featured an 18,000-square-foot expansion, resulting in an effective rent in the mid-$70s; Hipmunk at 434 Brannan St., which included a 17,000-square-foot short-term renewal and saw effective rents in the high $60s; and HoneyBook at 539 Bryant St., which included a 15,000-square-foot rental in the low $70s.

In the south Financial District, Class A space is up 3.5 percent to $69.80 per square foot. Recent lease deals include WeMo Technologies at 555 Market St., which rented 172,000 square feet in the high $60s; Instacart at 50 Beale St. has 56,000 square feet of lease space in the high $60s; and Intercom at 55 2nd St. has 23,000 square feet of space in the mid-$70s range.

Additionally, in the north Financial District, Class A space is up 5 percent to $65 per square foot. Recent deals include a Sheppard Mullin Richter renewal at 4 Embarcadero, with 72,000 square feet of space in the high $70s; Sentient Technologies at 1 California St., with 17,000 square feet going for the low $70s; and HIG Capital at 1 Sansome, with its 11,000 square feet priced in the low $70s.

Link to article: SF Office Rents Continue Their Rise

Jul

National CRE News: Borrowing Rates Edging Up in Advance of Expected Fed Move

But in Current Competitive Environment, Other Banks Still Cutting Deals
Source: CoStar
By: Mark Heschmeyer
Posted: July 29, 2015

Even though the Fed today signaled that it remains on course to raise interest rates in September or later this year, a few banks have already begun raising interest pricing on their commercial real estate loans, particularly for multifamily property. While long expected given the overall strength of the economy, the bump in pricing is coming weeks in advance of an expected hike in the Federal Reserve Bank lending rate.

“We’ve seen rates increase, both on the Treasuries and on swaps, and we’ve seen the increase being sustained and we’ve been wanting to raise interest rates for the last several weeks,” said Joseph DePaolo, president and CEO of Signature Bank.

However, DePaolo said his bank wasn’t able to raise rates in the second quarter because their competition wasn’t moving.

“You can’t be a half or more [percentage points] higher because no matter how much they want you and no matter how efficient our commercial real estate team is, half is a half, and it means a lot,” he said, noting the highly competitive lending environment.

But that has changed in the last 10 days.

“We did some due diligence last week and again yesterday (July 20) and found that our competitors were raising their five-year fixed from let’s say as low as 3% to 3.25%,” DePaolo said. “We were 3% and we simply raised ours to 3.5% and that was yesterday.”

While all the signs appear to point to interest rates finally moving up after many previous fals starts, not everyone is convinced that higher rates will finally take hold.

“That’s possible, but there’s no guarantee,” said Peter Ho, chairman, president and CEO of Bank of Hawaii. “We have seen these [trends] in the past, where it sure looks like rates are moving up and margins stabilized only to find out that, it’s not really a trend, it’s an aberration. So it’s definitely possible, but as I said, I just can’t guarantee that.”

With the expected change in rates, Stephen Gordon, chairman, president and CEO of Opus Bank in Irvine, CA, said his bank has been cutting back on multifamily lending, reducing its multifamily loans in its portfolio from 59% of its holdings to 53% this past quarter.

However, while certain banks have begun the shift to more costly money, the improving economy has banks competing intensely for borrowers as they return to market. As a result, aggressive competition for commercial real estate lending is continuing across much of the country.

“In my opinion [lending competition] remains brutal,” said Mark Hoppe, president, CEO of MB Financial Bank in Chicago.

That is particularly true in CRE lending, Hoppe noted. Loan to values are clearly going up and the bank is seeing more relaxation in the amount of guarantees required in some deals.

“We understand that this is the world we live in, a very competitive one, and we’re going to compete on every front but do it where we think it makes sense,” Hoppe said.

CRE Borrowing Moving Beyond Major Metros

René Jones, chief financial officer of M&T Bank, noted a significant shift in CRE lending patterns. In previous quarters, most of the lending growth in M&T’s markets were primarily around the New York City metro area. That’s not the case this past quarter.

“Right now, growth is everywhere,” Jones said.

Total loans in upstate and western New York, were up 4%. In metropolitan New York and Philadelphia, up 8%; in Pennsylvania, up 12%; in Baltimore, up 7%; and in its other regions, loan growth went up 5%.

Other CRE lending trends noted among the nation’s major banks emerged from mid-year earnings conference calls. Highlights follow:

The Eyes on Texas

“The Eyes of Texas” is the school spirit song of the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas at El Paso, but from an economic and CRE standpoint all eyes have been on just Houston for the last three quarters. With energy prices not rebounding much from their 2014 collapse, there has been a lot of concern about how Houston multifamily and office properties will hold up.

Although lenders are seeing some softness in the market, second quarter results appear to be muted.

“Our office construction portfolio is very modest in size. And the office term loan portfolio is performing well there,” said Scott J. McLean, president and COO of Zions Bancorp in Salt Lake City. “On the multifamily piece, we’ve had about five, six multifamily transactions that have come out of the construction period and they’re achieving rents that are actually above the pro formas. But clearly, there will be softness there for office and there will be softness in multifamily, but we think our real estate portfolio is about $1.5 billion less going into this downturn than it was going into the 2009 downturn,” McLean said.

However, McLean likes the overall direction of the Houston economy. While job growth won’t be the 80,000 to 100,000 new jobs it has averaged over the last couple of years, McLean said the market could see 10,000 to 20,000 new jobs this year and about 30,000 new housing starts.

“Sure Houston continues to be a dynamic market,” said Keith Cargill, president, CEO of Texas Capital Bancshares, but “there is no change in our view that we will see muted growth in CRE.”

“We know we are early relative to what appears to be still a very healthy market really in all categories. Our multifamily is still extremely strong. Even in our Houston market where we have some projects, I had some concern about six or eight months ago. They are holding up quite nicely and as they complete they seem to be hitting pro forma rates or better. And so we hope that continues,” Cargill said.

“We just believe strongly that you can have too much of a good thing in terms of concentration risk,” he added. “And while today [CRE, building and energy] are three of the healthiest businesses we have, they have more cyclical risk in a down cycle. And that’s the only reason that we are tamping down the growth rate.”

Lending for the Long-Term, Borrowing for the Short-Term

Rapidly escalating CRE prices are a mixed bag for banks. On the one hand, they create demand for loans. Banks are pricing those loans based generally on 10-year payback periods. But with the run-up in CRE values stretching into its fifth year, borrowers are flipping investments much more quickly than that.

Loan prepays are definitely on the high side, said Russ Colombo, president and CEO Bank of Marin in Marin County, CA.

“There is a fair amount of profit-taking going on,” Colombo said.

Link to article: Fed Move

Jul

National CRE News: US Office Real Estate Market Grows; Businesses Continue To Add Office Jobs

At Midyear, Accelerating New Office Supply Held In Check By Strong Absorption
U.S. Office Market Reaches Supply-Demand ‘Sweet Spot’ as Tenants Trade Up to Higher-Quality Space Despite Rising Rents
Source: CoStar
Reporter: Randyl Drummer
Posted: June 22, 2015

U.S. office market demand growth rebounded in the second quarter of 2015 following slower-than-expected net absorption in the first three months of the year as businesses continued to add office jobs and lease space.

Net absorption roared to 25 million square feet in the second quarter, the second-highest quarter for demand growth since 2006 and more than double the 12 million square feet absorbed during the first quarter.

After years of slow and steady increase in office supply, the level of office space under construction reached 124 million square feet in the second quarter, the highest total since 2009 and slightly eclipsing the 15-year average of 122 million square feet.

Rent growth reached s 4% annual rate in the first half of 2015, while the national office vacancy rate declined 20 basis points to 11.2%. The 27 million square feet of new office space deliveries in the first half of 2015 exceeded the historical first-half average of 21 million square feet, reflecting a relatively healthy office market and broader economy.

“We’re at a supply/demand balance — a really sweet spot in the market cycle for the office market,” said Walter Page, CoStar Group, Inc. director of U.S. research, office, joined by Senior Manager, Market Analytics Aaron Jodka and Managing Director Hans Nordby for CoStar’s State of the U.S. Office Market Midyear 2015 Review and Forecast.

Link to Article: Highest Q2 Office Net Absorption in 7 Years

Jul

San Francisco Commercial Real Estate News: One of the World’s Largest Developers Hunts in SF

Exclusive: One of the World’s biggest developers hunts for mega projects in Oakland, S.F.
Source: San Francisco Business Times
Reporter: Cory Weinberg
Date Posted: June 30, 2015

One of the world’s largest real estate developers, Shanghai-based Greenland Holding Group, is in talks to invest and build in the Bay Area for the first time, the company’s U.S. head told the San Francisco Business Times.

I-Fei Chang, who is overseeing $6 billion worth of development for Greenland’s Los Angeles-based subsidiary, is looking for opportunities to park billions more. She said she travels to the Bay Area “biweekly” to meet with local companies and city officials about building the company’s third U.S. project here.

A development deal would draw even more Chinese capital to Bay Area real estate and introduce to the region an investor that has so far been elusive. But for a foreign company only looking at mammoth deals, finding the right project can be a headache.

“We do have something (in the Bay Area) in mind. We are busy paddling,” she told the Business Times at a National Association of Real Estate Editors conference in Miami. “It’s like a duck — you keep calm on the surface of the water but the feet are quite busy paddling in the water.”

“It always takes time. We wish it could be quicker,” added Chang, a native of Taiwan and a graduate of Yale University. “It just really depends on the accessibility of the projects that we’d have the opportunity to invest.”

Greenland Holding claims to be world’s largest property developer by floor space under construction (250 million square feet) and by sales revenue ($40 billion), the Wall Street Journal reported.

The company, which is owned by the Chinese government, took a pass on investing in Lennar Urban’s $8 billion Hunters Point Shipyard project. It instead bought a majority stake in Forest City’s $4.9 billion Pacific Park Brooklyn project next to Barclays Center. Last year, Greenland broke ground on the $1-billion downtown Los Angeles hotel, condominium and shopping complex called Metropolis, which it bought in 2013.

Greenland USA then took another stab at investing in San Francisco. Late last year, the company lost out to Shanghai-based Oceanwide Holdings in buying the First and Mission Streets property– which will span 2 million square feet of office, condominium and hotel space by 2019.

Greenland Holding has invested about $20 billion in overseas development projects since 2013, including developments in London, Sydney and Toronto. The company has more than $55 billion in global assets, according to a report by Knight Frank. Chinese builders have looked toward the western world mostly because their own residential market has cooled significantly. The Chinese government has also recently relaxed limits on outbound investments.

Investment hurdles

Greenland USA is looking to develop large mixed-use projects like their deals in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, Chang said. That separates Greenland from other Chinese developers like Vanke, the Lumina condo complex joint venture partner, and R&F Properties, the 555 Fulton St. developer, who have focused on solely residential projects.

Chang wouldn’t say how deep current development talks are. She also spoke at length about investing in areas of cities that are undergoing “transformation” and in need of middle-class housing. But she also lamented rising construction and labor costs as the U.S. real estate market heats up.

She said construction costs have risen by 20 percent on Greenland’s two current U.S. projects since the company got involved.

“We have the stomach, and we envision there’s so much space that’s under transformation quickly,” she said. “But we still want to break even with what we build… We also see some prices that are overheated and those prices go sky high. That concerns us.”

Rob Hielscher, the Western U.S. head of JLL’s International Capital Group, said a many development projects make financial sense in San Francisco, but finding large-scale development opportunities can be a struggle, particularly with the city’s Proposition M office space cap limiting the amount of office space that developers can deliver in San Francisco.

“The bigger issue is the lack of large-scale development opportunities that are currently available for groups like Greenland to purchase or invest in” he said.

Some of the biggest mixed-use projects in San Francisco’s development pipeline include Forest City’s 5M and Pier 70 projects, the Giants’ Mission Rock and Kilroy Realty Corp.’s Flower Mart. Only the Giants’ project has priority to squeeze under the office space cap.

The only mixed-use proposals of over 1 million square feet in Oakland is the Brooklyn Basin waterfront project, which attracted investment from China’s Zarsion Holdings two years ago, and East Oakland’s Coliseum City, which is fraught with political risk.

But if it does find the right deal, Greenland’s global clout will likely give it a leg up over other Chinese investors that may be less recognizable to U.S. builders, Hielscher said. “They’re a name brand that many domestic groups would want to work with,” Hielscher said.

Ready for Oakland?

Zhang Yuliang, Greenland Holding Group’s chairman, told reporters in December, that “we’d increase our investment in cities where there is potential for growth, in the big cities.”

In the Bay Area, that doesn’t just mean San Francisco. Rachel Flynn, Oakland’s planning director, and Darlene Chiu Bryant, head of the San Francisco-backed nonprofit China SF, confirmed that Greenland has met with officials from both cities about development opportunities recently.

“They seemed really interested in our city, but nothing seems imminent,” Flynn said, who added that the city told Greenland about its upcoming downtown specific plan that should clear hurdles for development. “It will be interesting to see what they end up focusing on.”

Chang seemed high on Oakland. She brushed off a question about what made her enthusiastic about a city that struggles to attract big investors because of a reputation for crime and poor government, as well as its uncertain payoff on building highrises.

Instead, she extolled Oakland’s short commute to San Francisco on BART, the proximity to the University of California at Berkeley, and the city’s waterfront.

“There’s no crime in the city if you have believers who want to believe they’re pioneers.” she said. “Why can’t we have more housing projects for the middle class that includes an easy commute? Oakland is just like a Brooklyn for us on the Pacific side.”

“It’s all about what we can do for your city and how we can have that partnership,” she added.

Interview with I-Fei Chang

What is Greenland’s mission?

It’s our mission to not only bring over Chinese capital but expertise of large-scale, mixed-use urban experience that we have in China and from our development experience in the U.K., Canada, Malaysia. We hope to invest and reach out to the community to understand the city’s vision. Our long-term partner is the city and community, to be there a long time.

Why did you land in Brooklyn and Los Angeles first? Why not the Bay Area?

Those two markets, we just were lucky to have the opportunity to select the right project at the right time — two important economic-driver kind of projects . Of course, we’d love to have the opportunity to enter the northern gate of California, to be in the Bay Area. It just really depends on the accessibility of the projects that we’d have the opportunity to invest.

You earlier called Los Angeles, not San Francisco, the “capital of the Pacific.” Why is that?

Just the population, the diversity. It’s an entertainment center. But you have the wineries.

Who is your target residential customer in the U.S.?

Two million people buy from us in China. But here it’s most important to provide urban living experiences, to develop mixed-use projects in U.S. cities. Our target customer would be U.S.-based, young professional or early retiree. They just want to enjoy urban living so we provide the facility, the garden, the daycare center, the school and the public green space to get an apartment, hotel or office; that kind of mixed-use project, a one-stop solution.

Are you finding it more difficult to locate and find opportunities in the states?

We need to meet our business cycle. What’s driving this overheated market that we are cautious of is land price and construction costs. After we obtained these two projects, construction costs rose 20 percent. And the target sales prices of the unit, we have to be cautious about what will be the next opportunity for us to choose. What will be middle-class income, and what is the price they can support if they want condominiums?

Are those opportunities even existing at this point?

Our strategy is certainly for one way to approach private owners and explain to them our vision here, our sense of urgency to make a change here. We reach out to city officials, planners, economic directors, and so on, to see if publicly-owned land can be obtained and have a public-private partnerships.

But how do you get to middle-class housing solutions? In the Bay Area, we have a lack of supply. Market rates are out of reach for the middle class, and those units fund below-market-rate units that middle-class families don’t qualify for.

There are multiple ways. I know architects and developers in Japan and Russia. In Russia, the land is dirt cheap. The land is controlled by the government, so the developers just lease, so the cost is very cheap. It (brings down) the construction costs. The government just needs to be very smart to find some developer with an injection of cash into the government land. There are various ways to utilize urban land.

Link to article: Greenland Holding

Jun

San Francisco Commercial Real Estate News: Office Sublease Availability Hits Five-Year High

Don’t Fret: 5 reasons San Francisco companies are dumping office space
Source: San Francisco Business Times
Reporter: Cory Weinberg
Date Posted: June 8, 2015

The sizzling San Francisco office market may have gotten some cold water sprinkled on it, now that the amount of space for sublease has hit a five-year high. Some office market observers have said this could be a signal that the office market may be cooling off, possibly a leading indicator that technology companies are getting too ambitious with their space needs.

But real estate brokerages have sprung to the market’s defense, arguing that the sublease trend is a positive sign. Subleases loosen the market, which makes it healthier, and give startups in need of quick space the opportunity to stay in San Francisco, they say.

“Many landlords are unwilling to sign for less than seven years, so tech startups in particular are finding the sublease market to be a viable option,” a market report by the brokerage JLL said. JLL also pointed out sublease space is being gobbled up at a quick pace – staying on the market for just 94 days on average.

Cushman & Wakefield said there’s “no need to fret.” San Francisco has “nowhere near the amount of vacant sublease space recorded during the dot-com bust just after the turn of the century.”

And now CBRE has crunched numbers that detail why tech firms and non-tech firms are ditching their office space. Tech firms have put 450,000 square feet of space on the market, while non-tech firms have put 745,000 square feet.

The graphic at the bottom (click here for infograph: Graph) breaks down why companies have put up space. We’ll explain what they are:

Space banking

The biggest reason that tech firms have been subleasing is because they’re banking space. That accounts for about 135,000 square feet on the market. Square is one of the tech firms that fits into this trend. “Space banking means they’ve taken another space and would have already occupied it, but they took more than they needed,” said Colin Yasukochi, director of research for CBRE.

Outgrowing space

More than 100,000 square feet is on the market because a tech company has outgrown its space. The biggest example here? Salesforce, which is leasing out space in 1 California and 123 Mission as it grows into its new urban campus next to the future Transbay Transit Center.

Consolidation

About 100,000 square feet is on the market because tech firms have consolidated due to a merger or acquisition. That’s likely why the market has seen some real estate tech firms try to shed some space after Zillow acquired Trulia earlier this year.

Downsizing

About 17 percent of tech company sublease space and 22 percent of non-tech firm space is due to downsizing.
Exiting San Francisco

The bulk of non-tech firms that are trying to sublease space are moving jobs out of San Francisco. That’s why Charles Schwab is looking to shed 350,000 square feet of its space, though it’s maintained it will keep its headquarters present in San Francisco.

Link to article: SF Office Space

Apr

National Commercial Real Estate News: Office Construction Picking Up Momentum

BY THE NUMBERS: U.S. Office Construction Picking Up Momentum
108 Million Square Feet Under Construction-Highest Total since 2009

Source: Costar
By: Randyl Drummer
Date Posted: April 29, 2015

After nearly five years of steady but relatively moderate increases, deliveries of newly constructed office space exceeded quarterly office demand nationally in the first quarter as office construction levels moved closer toward their long-term average across the country.

About 15 million square feet of office space was delivered to the U.S. market in the first quarter of 2015, for the first time in the current economic cycle eclipsing total net absorption of office space, which was just over 12 million square feet, according to CoStar office market data.

About 108 million square feet was under construction at the end of first-quarter 2015, up 17% from 92 million square feet in the same period a year ago, according to CoStar data. The level of national office construction has risen very slowly since hitting its long-term historical trough of less than 50 million square feet in late 2010, producing quarterly supply growth that was the moral equivalent of zero when factoring in demolitions of obsolete office space and other loss of inventory.

With higher office rents making new development a viable alternative to buying existing buildings, the amount of office space under construction is finally approaching its quarterly historical average of 122 million square feet, a level last attained in late 2008.

Construction levels are above their historic norm in about one-third of the largest U.S. metros, led by Northern California’s Silicon Valley, where Apple is building its 2.8 million-square-foot “spaceship” corporate campus in Cupertino; and Houston, where ExxonMobil is building its huge new corporate campus. Total space under construction amounts to 7% and about 6%, respectively, of those markets’ rentable inventory.

Other markets seeing an above-average construction bump are Seattle, Austin, San Francisco, Raleigh, Dallas-Fort Worth, Boston, Chicago and Denver.

Shift In Strategy for Developers

Along with the growing demand for new office space comes a shift in strategy for the nation’s largest owners and developers of office buildings, especially those with projects in the largest U.S. CBDs.

Rather than in acquiring buildings at rapidly appreciating prices in its core markets of Boston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., Boston Properties (NYSE: BXP) is stepping up its strategy of re-investing capital it recycles from the sale of older buildings into new developments that yield higher returns.

“We are spending more time looking at new investments and development sites, or buildings requiring repositioning — both of which leverage our development and operating skill,” said Owen Thomas, Boston Properties chief executive officer, citing the company’s development pipeline of 11 office projects totaling 3.3 million square feet with a total projected cost of $2.1 billion.
Thomas told investors this week that BXP forecasts that these projects funded by cash on the balance sheet will generate a more than 7% cash net operating income yield over the next three years upon completion.

Rising office rents are driving the development boom in metros such as San Francisco, where Boston Property is building the 61-story, 1,070-foot-tall Salesforce Tower, formerly known as the Transbay Tower in the South of Market district. While rents in the Bay City have spiked 70% since the recession, however, two-thirds of the country is still not seeing the kind of rent growth that justifies large-scale new construction, including big metros such as Orange County, CA, Los Angeles and Atlanta.

Other metros seeing limited development or construction compared with history or are starting to cool down are Washington, D.C., Phoenix, San Diego and New York City.

Major project starts in the first quarter included the 1.7 million-square-foot campus fully leased to FMC Technologies in Houston. Also getting under way was the 610,000-square-foot Crosstown Concourse office project, a value-add redevelopment of the former Sears & Roebuck building pre-leased to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and other tenants.

Lincoln Property Co. has started 350 Bush Street, the first new office building in San Francisco’s Financial District in more than a decade. The speculative 433,000-square-foot project is driven by a tight 7.8% vacancy rate for top quality 4- and 5-Star buildings in the submarket.

In Phoenix’s Tempe submarket, Ryan Companies and Sunbelt Holdings have started 300 E. Rio Salado Parkway, a 480,000-square-foot building preleased to State Farm for a regional hub.

Office developers delivered 15 million square feet in the quarter, compared with 11 million square feet in the first quarter of 2014, and while completions will pick up slightly through the rest of the year, they will likely total between 65 and 70 million square feet, below the historical completion rate.

Notable first-quarter deliveries included the 1.5 million-square-foot second phase of ExxonMobil’s corporate campus in Houston; and 1K Fulton, a 689,067-square-foot building in the Chicago market that is now 39% occupied, according to CoStar information.

Link to article: US Office Construction

Apr

National Commercial Real Estate News: Prices Continue to Advance Across More Markets & Building Types

Absorption of Lower-End Commercial Properties Rises 61% Over 12 Months Ended First-Quarter 2015

Source: CoStar
Reporter: Randyl Drummer
Date Posted: April 15, 2015

Continuing the broad recovery across all property types and throughout most U.S. markets, commercial real estate prices again moved upward in February, reflecting solid occupier demand as well as widening investor interest in smaller properties outside the largest U.S. metros.

The latest CoStar Commercial Repeat Sale Indices (CCRSI) shows that the two broadest measures of U.S. commercial property pricing, the value-weighted and the equal-weighted U.S. Composite Indices, gained 1.5% and 1.4%, respectively, in February. That’s a continuation of January’s strong performance, and both of these key indices have increased by more than 13% over the past 12 months as final sale pricing increases expand into smaller markets and secondary property types.

The equal-weighted composite index, reflecting rising momentum in transactions for smaller properties at the lower end of the market, in February has now recovered within 12% of its pre-recession high — its highest average since the fourth quarter of 2008 — with investors parking their capital in alternative locations as prices escalate in the most desirable core markets. The index has now recovered by 37.4% above its 2011 trough.

The momentum shift to lesser-quality and smaller properties has also turned up in recent growth in the General Commercial Index property segment, which has increased by 13.4% over the 12 months. Its higher-end counterpart, the Investment Grade Index, rose by 9.3%.

The value-weighted U.S. Composite Index — more heavily influenced by the high-value trades in the best primary markets that led the recovery — surpassed its previous 2008 peak by more than 8.8% in February.

Continuing what has become an seasonal slowing trend in recent years, net absorption of office, retail and industrial space slowed in first-quarter 2015 from its pace during the last three quarters of 2014. However, net absorption still totaled 527.2 million square feet for the 12 months ended March 30 — a very strong 39.6% above the previous 12-month period that ended in March of last year.

In more evidence of broad recovery, net absorption of general commercial properties rose a whopping 61% over the 12-month period, compared with a 31.4% gain in the investment grade segment. That’s a switch from earlier in the recovery, when high-end assets led absorption trends as tenants chased lower rents to move into prime space.

Leasing momentum is shifting toward low-end properties as vacancies have fallen and rents have escalated at the top end of the market, however.

For example, vacant office space in the 4 and 5 Star property segment dipped below its 15-year average of 12% in 2014, helping accelerate absorption and rent growth for 3-Star properties for the 12 months through first-quarter 2015.

Investment sales activity in the first three months of 2015 followed the typical pattern, falls from the previous year-end level. Despite the slowdown from the fourth quarter of 2014, however, trading activity through the end of February suggests another active year for CRE acquisitions in 2015.

The U.S. composite sales pair count of 2,357 and sales volume of $18.9 billion in the first two months of 2015 exceeded totals from the same period in 2014, while the share of properties selling at distressed prices fell from 32% in 2011 to less than 10% for the 12 months ended February 2015.

Link to article: CRE Rising Prices

Apr

San Francisco Commercial Real Estate News: Does SF tech firms shedding office space indicate a bubble?

Source: San Francisco Business Journal
Reporter: Cory Weinberg
Date Posted: April 23, 2015

About 50,000 square feet of space in at 1455 Market St. just hit the market – a big block leased by the public advertising tech company Rocket Fuel. The brokerage Savills Studley said in a report that Rocket Fuel (NASDAQ:FUEL) is the kind of company subleasing space after “not expanding as quickly as anticipated or shedding a bit of payroll.” After the company’s revenue growth faltered, it said it wouldn’t hire as aggressively.

Rocket Fuel isn’t alone in shopping around its offices. The sublease market in San Francisco has suddenly ticked up, and sublease space now makes up the largest percentage of vacant space since the depths of the recession, according to new data by the brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. San Francisco and Silicon Valley lead the nation in sublease space as a percentage of vacancies – about 13 percent for each.

It’s a leading indicator important enough to raise eyebrows if it means that companies got too ambitious with their real estate needs and are shedding space – puncturing a hole in a potential office market bubble.

But market watchers aren’t jumping to that conclusion yet.

Developers and brokers aren’t panicking because the raw amount of sublease space on the market in San Francisco – nearly 650,000 square feet – doesn’t come close to the 2 million square feet of subleased space on the market during the recession or the 6 million square feet during the dot-com bust. The amount of total vacant space is also at a 15-year low, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

Sublease space increased a bit last quarter in part because “tenants (particularly tech-related tenants) are leasing or pre-leasing ahead of hiring to lock in today’s rents before further increases,” Cushman & Wakefield’s research director Robert Sammons wrote.

Sammons said San Francisco and Silicon Valley’s high proportion of subleased space has some likely company: New York City’s Midtown South submarket, which is also heavy on technology companies, has the same sublease rate.

“Not every tech firm is going to be the next Google, so there will be an ebb and flow where they expanded more than they should have,” he added in a phone call. “The flip side of that is that there are a lot of tenants looking for built, plug-and-play space because they don’t know what the next year is going to bring them.”

Plus, he added, San Francisco is still posting some of the best employment numbers in the country and office development hasn’t slowed – two other indicators to watch.

A boost in sublease space can help companies feeling the squeeze from the city’s 8.1 vacancy rate, one of the lowest in the nation. The companies shedding the space get to cash in, too.

The digital real estate marketplace Trulia (NASDAQ:TRLA), for example, just put two floors – 26,600 square feet – up for sublease in the new, gleaming 535 Mission St. tower. A spokesman said the company is “investigating opportunities in the normal course of business” and taking advantage of San Francisco’s “hot commercial real estate market.” The company was also just acquired by Zillow, which also put about 20,000 square feet of its 222 Bush St. on the sublease market.

Even Salesforce (NASDAQ:CRM) is subleasing about 144,000 square feet in One California St. and 70,000 square feet in 123 Mission St. as it moves into its eventual urban campus next to the Transbay Transit Center.

Other available sublease spaces include Microsoft’s 30,000 square feet at 835 Market St., Conversant’s 32,000 square feet at 160 Spear St. and IZ-ON’s 40,000 square feet at 600 Harrison St.

In San Carlos and Redwood City, new sublease openings by SoftBank and DreamWorks add up to about to 400,000 square feet
“In most cases, sublet space has been added by companies that are banking space for future use and want to monetize in the meantime,” according to Savills Studley’s latest market report. “The sublet space provides scant relief to a space-parched market.”

Link to article: Office Space Bubble

Apr

San Francisco Commercial Real Estate News: Expanding Manufacturing Space

How SFMade is expanding San Francisco’s manufacturing space
Source: San Francisco Business Times
Reporter: Annie Sciacca
Date Posted: April 21, 2015

It’s expensive to build office space in San Francisco, but it can be even more challenging to build industrial space, and make it pencil, according to SFMade executive director Kate Sofis.

That’s why SFMade,which works to expand manufacturing in San Francisco, launched a sister nonprofit, PlaceMade a nonprofit real estate development initiative akin to an affordable housing developer.

Similar to affordable manufacturing space developers in other cities, such as Greenpoint Manufacturing out of Brooklyn, PlaceMade is focused on partnering with the city and with private sector developers to create industrial space. It also provides consulting support to developers or architects who need input on how best to design an industrial product suited for manufacturing.

“In this city we haven’t focused on manufacturing in the past as much as other cities have,” Sofis said. While zoning is effective, and there isn’t a ton of encroachment on industrial space from other uses, the urgent need at the moment is simply for more space.

The demand for space has bakers and chocolatiers competing for space with businesses like repair shops, clothing makers and 3D printer manufacturers. Some are bootstrapping their money while others get investment, and the differences in products mean wildly different profit margins. That means bidding wars can knock out those with less cash flow.

“There is a shortage right now; rents are up 30 to 40 percent just in the past two years or so,” David Lai, a principal with Yosemite Investment LLC, told the Business Times in September. That South San Francisco-based company develops and runs industrial space.

The first project to come from PlaceMade is the 56,000-square-foot multi-tenant industrial building that could be the first new manufacturing building in decades. Approved in January, more details on the project are emerging.

SFMade’s “manufacturing foundry” is part of a three-building site at 100 Hooper St. in the Potrero Hill neighborhood. Currently a self-storage facility, SFMade’s building, which is at 150 Hooper, would provide space for food producers, clothing makers and other startup manufacturers in the city.

Designed by Pfau Long Architecture, the building is the first project to take advantage of legislation sponsored by Supervisor Malia Cohen and Mayor Ed Lee that offers developers increased office space in exchange for dedicating a large portion of their buildings to manufacturing space.

The other buildings at 100 Hooper will connect via skybridges, making it a “campus-style” project, said Daniel Murphy of Urban Green Devco, which is developing the site.

In addition to the SFMade building, 100 Hooper will have another 90,000 square-feet of industrial space on the ground floor of the other two buildings, and the remainder — about 290,000 square-feet — will go to offices.

SFMade will own the manufacturing building outright, and it is pouring $20 million into construction costs alone, Sofis said, adding that the number would be much higher if the organization was not partnering with a developer as it is.

Having its own manufacturing space will allow SFMade to further its effort to find space for startup manufacturers and pursue public subsidies, such as new market tax credit, that will allow it to ultimately lower the rent for the manufacturing spaces it rents out, Sofis said.

SFMade will rent out the spaces at a range of about $15 to $22 per square-foot — or less than $2 per month per square-foot. Other industrial spaces with the site’s proximity to downtown San Francisco are trending well above $24 — in some cases, $36 — per month, Sofis said.

The space will also provide around 200 manufacturing jobs, mostly for people in entry-level positions and from lower-income communities. And SFMade will have personnel in the building to provide consulting and resources for manufacturers.

There’s been a flight of light industrial users to other cities with lower costs, Murphy said.

“We haven’t had space to accommodate the growing industrial sector,” he said. “This is a response to those trends.”

While SFMade will continue to help its network of manufacturers find space, PlaceMade’s focus will be on creating permanently affordable industrial space.

Some areas of the city are more ripe for industrial development than others. Areas like the Dogpatch and the northeast portion of the Mission have vibrant manufacturing scene, including Rickshaw Bagworks, Heath Ceramics, and Timbuk2.

The lower Potrero area, where the Hooper buildings are, holds potential, too, Sofis said, as does the Bayview neighborhood. The key is adding density and building vertically on sites that make sense for manufacturing. The Bayview, for example, has spots that could be renovated for better uses or added to. There are a few self-storage facilities that could provide cross-subsidization needed for such projects, Sofis said. In other neighborhoods, office space makes more sense as a partner in developing this kind of space.

Construction on 100 Hooper will likely begin in the second half of this year, Murphy said, and will take about a year to build.

Link to Article: SFMADE

Apr

National CRE News: Too Much? Too Fast? Part II

Too Much? Too Fast? (Part II)
Investors Digging Deeper for Best Potential Returns CRE Investors Still See Plenty of Opportunities To Be Had if You Know Where and What To Look For

By: Mark Heschmeyer
Source: Costar
Date: April 1, 2015

While some commercial real estate investors are starting to voice concern over the impact of the glut of investment capital on prices and underwriting, for many others the question prompted by the flood of capital earmarked for CRE investment is what to do with it all.

As CoStar News reported in Part I of this two-part story last week, the grumblings mostly appear to be focused on escalating prices for large trophy assets in major coastal core markets and the multifamily markets where development activity has already heated up and is threatening to curtail pricing growth.

“Buyers are extremely aggressive in gateway and other primary markets, mainly in the multifamily, industrial and core-located office asset classes,” said Ryan Tobias, founding partner of Triad Real Estate Partners in Chicago. “It’s seemingly a seller’s market in those places and there’s almost certainly a bubble somewhere as the rent growth and associated pricing cannot continue forever.”

However, the aggressiveness and the easy availability of cheap money aren’t necessarily deal breakers, according to Tobias. Rather, he said the trend should cause investors to pay even closer attention to market fundamentals and understand conditions in each submarket down to the block.

For Part II of this story, we asked investors and brokers where they see the best returns available for the money. And while some are still concerned about putting more money into core markets and in certain multifamily markets, that doesn’t mean there aren’t good returns to be had in those products and places. Real wage growth is just starting to take hold and thus core office and multifamily product still have legs, many said.

Smart money seems to be moving to certain interior or secondary metropolitan areas, Tobias said, but not to every submarket within those areas.

Other factors also have to be weighed in the balance beyond location, said Don Guarino, vice president of valuation and research for Aegon USA Realty Advisors.

“Tenant retention, appropriate capital expenditures, proper leverage levels, technology upgrades and energy efficiencies will be largely responsible for outperformance in the coming years as cap rate compression nears the end of its course,” Guarino said.

In the quest for overlooked markets, investors can over extend, warns Guarino. Tertiary markets may be a “bridge too far” if there is not a well-founded exit strategy, no matter how good the tenant or value-add opportunities in a given market.

Benjamin B. Lacy, chairman of Lacy Ltd. in Washington, DC, agrees with the importance of maintaining investment discipline no matter the size or location of the market.

“I think there’s room to run in some overlooked secondary and tertiary markets. But you have to be very careful with your underwriting and due diligence and to make sure the market is liquid enough to project a realistic exit at the end of the holding period. I am getting strong pitches in Salt Lake City,” Lacy said.

Kevin McGowan, president of McGowan Corporate Real Estate Advisors in one of those tertiary markets (Allentown, PA), said plenty of opportunities still exist for disciplined investors. The key, he said is “to be flexible and really press their network for off-market deals. There is lots of lazy capital trying to chase down the heavily marketed product. (But) lots of really good corporate assets are out there if you are willing to dig.”

Brian Poitras, president, chief investment officer of Waldorf Capital Management, said his firm is pursuing a modified core strategy looking for overlooked opportunities in markets, such as where he is based in Boston.

“The asset class that I think presents the most opportunity righ now is well located Class B office space right around core markets, transit hubs and in growing urban infill locations,” Poitras said. “The demands of office users are changing. There will be many older, obsolete office buildings in great locations, but with poor lighting, poor air circulation, and inefficient floorplans. They could see a huge value boost through smart redevelopment.”

Link to article: Too Much Too Fast Part II