Silicon Valley | Calco Commercial, Inc.

Category: Silicon Valley (3)

Sep

CRE News: Tech still critical to Bay Area Real Estate Economy

According to Bisnow, “tech and life sciences companies made up 67.1% of total office leasing activity in Silicon Valley and 64.6% in San Francisco for 2017 through midyear 2018.” With nearly daily headlines of Facebook and other tech giants snapping up huge swaths of space in San Francisco and its surrounds, it is no surprise that the Bay Area’s tech leasing activity is approximately 40% higher than the nation.

Tech, media, and e-commerce firms, both large and small, understand that in order to be competitive and attract talent, they need a physical presence in the Bay Area. San Francisco Bay Area continues to hold the title for most tech jobs in the United States. Real estate professionals project that tech will continue to expand in Silicon Valley, although solutions to issues such as affordable housing/cost of living will need to be explored to retain the skilled labor force necessary for start-ups and big tech.

Mar

San Francisco Tech CRE: Google Leases Additional 57K SF in Hills Plaza

Source: the Registry
By: Vladimir Bosanac
Date Posted: March 28, 2018
Link to Article: GOOGLE

San Francisco continues to be a magnet for tech companies small and large. While making strides in acquiring buildings and land across Silicon Valley, Google is also making sure its presence in the city continues to build upon an established base that will keep the talent flowing and projects moving along. According to a recent report by CoStar, Google has expanded its footprint in San Francisco at its 2 Harrison Street location, signing on to take additional 57,000 square feet in the building.

The space that Google is taking over is currently occupied by Gensler, the international and world-renown architecture firm, which will be vacating the building shortly.

The building has been home to Google for some time, and with this expansion, the technology giant will occupy around 125,000 square feet in the property. The property, also known as Hills Plaza, was once home to Hills Bros. Coffee, where the company’s coffee plant was once located. It was built in 1924 and later renovated in 1986. Today it has 211,000 square feet, and Google’s latest lease would put it over half of building.

Other tenants in the building are Mozilla (the makers of the Firefox web browser), Marin Day School, the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and the offices of the owner, Prime Property Fund, which is a Morgan Stanley core property fund.

The building is located along the Embarcadero, and it sits almost at the foot of the Bay Bridge with views of the bay, Treasure Island and Oakland. The building is also home to Palomino restaurant, which is located on the ground floor.

Google has been in the news almost weekly in the last few months. Along with negotiating a massive development in San Jose next to the city’s Diridon Station, the company has continued its buying spree across the region and especially so in Silicon Valley. In February, the company received an approval from the city of San Jose to purchase land that was previously owned by the city for $67 million. Just a month earlier, it spent $117.25 million on three industrial buildings also in San Jose. In Sunnyvale, along with spending around $250 million in the fourth quarter of 2017 to buy land and properties, it also proposed a new, one-million-square-foot campus that would house 4,500 employees.

Apr

Tech CRE News: Bloomberg reports startups leaving Silicon Valley for more Hospitable Homes

Source: Bloomberg
By: Rani Molla, Shira Ovide
Date Posted: April 18, 2016

The Bay Area has long been the center of the technology world, and it remains the undisputed king of startups. But lower wattage tech hubs are popping up as hospitable homes for the next Facebook or Google.

The bloom of more silicon cities has spread tech jobs into some unlikely places such as Florida and Utah, but it has also brought some of the attendant annoyances familiar to Northern California, including rising costs for office space.

U.S. venture capital firms — the financiers seeking to find and fund the next Google or Facebook — wrote $12.1 billion worth of checks for U.S. startups in the first quarter of 2016, according to a PwC and NVCA MoneyTree report based on data from Thomson Reuters. About 40 percent of that sum went to young companies in the Bay Area, a share of startup financing that has increased from a decade ago.

But some of the biggest deals in the first quarter of 2016 went to companies outside of the Bay Area. Magic Leap — a Dania, Fla., startup that is working on technology to mix virtual images with the real world — collected $794 million from investors. Domo, a business software startup based in American Fork, Utah, added $131 million to its coffers so far this year, and it is laying the groundwork for an initial public offering.

The spread of startup money outside the Bay Area has helped those cities take advantage of growth in high-tech jobs, which has far outpaced that of office jobs overall.

And while Silicon Valley continues to lead the pack, Phoenix, Austin, Nashville, Indianapolis, Charlotte and Salt Lake City all made the top 10 list for growth in high-tech jobs, according to the latest available citywide data from real estate services firm CBRE, which analyzed U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The trend of startup money and jobs flowing beyond the Bay Area is no accident. Startup founders say pay for employees in other tech hubs such as Seattle, Salt Lake City and Birmingham, Ala., tends to be lower than it is in the Bay Area. Startup workers outside Silicon Valley also tend to job-hop less often and demand fewer perks like free burritos and hammocks in the office.

Investors say they like those non-Bay Area startups, too, because valuations tend to be a bit lower, which means each dollar of investment buys them a larger piece of a startup. For example, PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel recently mentioned he was hunting for investments outside of Silicon Valley.

Becoming a tech hub has downsides, too. The emergence of spots like Silicon Slopes (Salt Lake City), Silicon Beach (in the Los Angeles area) and Silicon Mountain (Denver) has also coincided with big jumps in office rental costs in some spots.

Link to article: Tech Moving from Silicon Valley