Op-Ed, Commercial Real Estate, Bay Area
greg fogg
TenantSee Weekly: What Do You See?

When you look at an office building, what do you see?  Maybe you see the architecture.  Maybe it’s the neighborhood, the restaurants, and amenities.  Perhaps, you see the views from within the building.  This is what most people see.  They’re all important.  But it’s what you don’t see that matters most.

TenantSee Weekly: What Do You See?
Op-Ed, Commercial Real Estate, Bay Area
greg fogg
TenantSee Weekly: Knowing Your When

We see a lot of confusion in the market around when to begin negotiations.  It’s not an insignificant consideration.  In fact, when you begin can make a huge difference in the outcome.  It’s understandable that tenants would not know when to start.  Brokers are not always keen to start at the right time, since compensation is derived by transacting and the closer the tenant is to lease expiration, the faster it will need to transact (and the fewer options it will have).  Good for the broker, bad for the tenant.  This creates a misalignment of interests that discourages thoughtful consultation on the front end – the more time a broker spends on a project, the lower the compensation. 

TenantSee Weekly: Knowing Your When
Op-Ed, Commercial Real Estate, Bay Area
greg fogg
TenantSee Weeky: A Big Decline in Rents, Four ...

Throughout 2020, the prevailing sentiment among investors in the San Francisco office market was one of relative optimism.  After all, despite the fact tenants were prohibited from occupying their buildings, they continued to collect full rent.  The buildings were full, with vacancy hovering around 4%.  Sure, companies weren’t happy about paying for space they couldn’t use, but business was good.  In many cases the tech sector (which makes up most of San Francisco’s office occupancy) was booming due to an even greater reliance on and usage of tech caused by pandemic driven changes in how people were living.  Throughout the course of 2020 there was no reason for San Francisco investors to panic, as few (if any) office occupiers were showing signs of developing long-term hybrid or remote-first strategies.  Most were simply focused on solving for ongoing operations as a temporary reaction to the pandemic.  Yet early indicators did point to a future in which companies would be shedding office space, as some expiring leases were not replaced.  This, coupled with the addition of new supply, caused a big increase in vacancy to nearly 12% by year end.  Despite this large uptick, the brunt of the sluggish demand dynamic was being felt in the sublease markets, where rental economics more accurately reflected the true state of the market.  Despite a total closing of the office market in 2020, average asking rents ended the year off just 6% from the pre-pandemic high.

TenantSee Weeky: A Big Decline in Rents, Four Years in the Making
Bay Area, Commercial Real Estate, Op-Ed
greg fogg
TenantSee Weekly: Modern Workplace Planning: ...

In the years leading up to the pandemic, most medium and small companies defined their office space need based on headcount (current and projected), space programming, and industry/sector norms.  The exercise was mostly formulaic.  The primary differences in the offices of a small, regional law firm compared to those of an AM Law 100 firm would be scale, the cost of finishes, and the quality of the building and views.  It was planning for the same outcome, just at different levels on the cost spectrum.  Companies having a larger portfolio of offices would typically create a “workplace strategy” that included guidelines around programming (e.g., space layout, office size, critical adjacencies, growth factor, finishes, FF&E, etc.).  These guidelines could then be used to inform the real estate process across geography.

TenantSee Weekly: Modern Workplace Planning: Solving for Experience Part I: The Purpose
Bay Area, Commercial Real Estate, Op-Ed
greg fogg
TenantSee Weekly: This, or That?

Negotiations are always about (or should always be about) this or that.  There’s always something else, maybe that something else is nothing (as in sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all).  Decisions made without proper consideration of all relevant alternative scenarios are decisions made poorly.  As important, in the context of office lease negotiations, the best negotiated outcomes are directly correlated to the extent to which we understand the alternatives of the landlord counterparty.  This is a bit counter intuitive, allow us to explain. 

TenantSee Weekly: This, or That?

#leaders

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TenantSee Weekly: No Free Lunch

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TenantSee Weekly: No Free Lunch

The office product offering is shifting to provide an array of hospitality-inspired experiences that, in some cases, rival those of a 5-Star hotel.  San Francisco landlords have lagged other markets in providing such high-end amenities because in the 2 decades prior to the pandemic, the supply/demand dynamic favored landlords, making it easier to lease space  (e.g., they didn’t have to).  For the past several years, however, San Francisco landlords have begun to spend millions on targeted amenities.  The typical playbook calls for some combination of health/fitness, conferencing and events, club/lounge/bar spaces, and specialty spaces, like golf simulator rooms and podcasting studios.

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TenantSee Weekly: Taxis and the Offices

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TenantSee Weekly: Taxis and the Offices

Technology replaces that which it improves. 
 
Not long ago, the streets of San Francisco were full of taxis.  Simply by raising your arm, you could hail a taxi in minutes.  Then, Uber and Lyft created their apps.  Their intention was always to disrupt an industry that hadn’t changed in decades.  Initially, many taxi drivers transitioned to become Uber and Lyft drivers, likely anticipating the technology would shift, not replace their work.  But that’s not how this is turning out.  Autonomous vehicles will replace human-driven, human transport solutions in major cities where taxi drivers once thrived.

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TenantSee Weekly: Disbributed (but only a little)

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TenantSee Weekly: Disbributed (but only a little)

Surveys indicate most workers favor a distributed workplace in which they can work from anywhere, any time.  When it comes to work, individuals focus (mostly) on their own specific benefits, as opposed to thinking about how the ways in which their work gets done affects the broader organization.  This makes sense, as one of the key benefits of our economic system is how it permits the individual to get ahead, to maximize its value.  Employees realize value in a variety of ways, including compensation and other variables.  Flexibility in where and when people work is high on the list of non-compensation related variables.

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TenantSee Weekly: Sell Your Occupancy by Leveraging Options

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TenantSee Weekly: Sell Your Occupancy by Leveraging Options

Negotiating a great office leasing outcome requires engagement with multiple prospective landlords over multiple rounds of negotiation.  It’s not just about having options; it’s about using them to create leverage.

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TenantSee Weekly: Planning for the Future, not the Moment

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TenantSee Weekly: Planning for the Future, not the Moment

Urban planning can go horribly wrong.  It often fails the test of time.  1950s America brought a surge in suburban development and car transportation.  It also led to one of the single worst American urban design decisions (my opinion), the development of the Embarcadero Freeway, originally intended to connect the San Francisco Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge by extending along the northeastern edge of the city as it hugs the bay -- effectively blocking the views along one of the most scenic corridors in any US city. 

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TenantSee Weekly: The Ingredients Matter

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TenantSee Weekly: The Ingredients Matter

Strategy is to occupier real estate what a recipe is to a great meal.  A recipe is more than the sum of its parts.  It’s about how each ingredient is prepared, how and when it’s added to the mix.  As with any recipe in which there are primary ingredients, vital to its success, similarly, every great strategy requires 3 main parts:

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TenantSee Weekly: Reconnecting Work to Place

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TenantSee Weekly: Reconnecting Work to Place

Lately I’ve been contemplating Enrico Morreti’s 2012 book “The New Geography of Jobs”.  In it, Morreti makes the case that urban winners and losers are determined, in large part, based on the extent of geographic concentrations of high-tech employment.  San Francisco was perhaps the most prominent example of the thriving economic ecosystems that can emerge when tech employment is aggregated in one region.  I believe Morreti’s core thesis remains correct.  But his ecosystems are more fragile than we may have anticipated.  In fact, it seems they can unravel in much less time than they took to build. 

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TenantSee Weeky: It's Not Really About the Office

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TenantSee Weeky: It's Not Really About the Office

It’s Not Really About the Office
 
We’re experiencing a behavioral shift which is changing one of the most pervasive social institutions of our time; namely, how, and where white-collar workers work.  Few societal constructs impact individuals, or society, as much as where and how we work.  The collective dialogue about this change, especially between employer and employee, has at times been challenging.  However, we’re now entering a more hopeful phase of the conversation, one which promises to finally move us to a new place, letting go of the idea that we must revert to pre-pandemic norms.

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TenantSee Weekly: The Disconnected Worker

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TenantSee Weekly: The Disconnected Worker

I read an article recently about layoffs in the tech sector.  In it, one worker shared her story of being laid off by 3 companies in less than a year.  The first was a startup where she had worked for several years.  She questioned why she had been selected – it clearly felt personal.  The next 2 employments were each of short duration, the last being merely a month long.  In the end, she was left questioning whether she wanted to continue working in tech.  The tech sector, especially the startup segment of the tech sector, has never been a great place to seek job security because of its inherent volatility.  Yet it has long been a place in which employers seek to espouse winning and attractive cultures that are all about “the people”.  This got me thinking about job security in the post-pandemic workplace.  Has employment in the information economy become more unstable because there is less connection between employer and employee?  Is the relationship between employer and employee becoming more transactional? 

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TenantSee Weekly: Sublease, Terminate, or Restructure

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TenantSee Weekly: Sublease, Terminate, or Restructure

Subleasing is the most common approach occupiers take in mitigating the cost of underutilized space.  Yet in San Francisco, it has become increasingly difficult to sublease office space.  With recoveries ranging from 0 to 25%, companies must consider the full spectrum of options.  Remember, too, sublease recoveries can be expensive to execute (fees and concessions); and, in subleasing, the occupier takes on a variety of risks that can prove costly (e.g., subtenant default). 

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TenantSee Weekly: I Digress...

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TenantSee Weekly: I Digress...

A little AI distraction to cheer your day (and relieve us of yet another discussion about workplace). Ever wandered through the streets and felt like you've stepped into the future? With their undeniable presence here in San Francisco, the driverless car is quickly becoming the most prominent representation of AI in our daily lives. If you spend any time in San Francisco neighborhoods, you can’t miss them. The other day, as I chatted with a neighbor, I counted 6 autonomous vehicles casually cruise by our front door within a span of 10 minutes. Intriguing, right? And today, in a twist of irony, I was held up by one. Blocked by a double-parked UPS truck, the driverless car hesitated, unsure about navigating into the lane of oncoming traffic. Of course, all the drivers in the opposing lane weren’t too keen to make space for the driverless car, as one normally would (or at least the more decent among us would) for a human-driven vehicle. Hence, we waited.

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TenantSee Weekly: Pandora's Office: Part II - The Psychology of Workspace

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TenantSee Weekly: Pandora's Office: Part II - The Psychology of Workspace

One of the positive outcomes emerging from a more holistic contemplation of work is a better understanding of how the behavioral and design elements of the workplace impact well-being, the psychology of the workplace.  Historically, the physical office and the culture that accompanied it, was largely a one-size fits all, top-down dictate that employees were not encouraged to question.  While this one-dimensional approach may have been easier to conceive, it had the detrimental effect of failing to adequately support some percentage (maybe a large percentage) of the employees.  But it’s a new day, a time when we have increased awareness of neurodiversity and sensory processing, an opportunity to provide optionality in support of the broad spectrum of employee (human) differences.  It’s a moment when we can more fully contemplate the psychology of the workplace.  Indeed, the more thoughtful we are in creating workplaces that cater to diverse employee needs, the better these environments will serve the organization.

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TenantSee Weekly: Pandora's Office

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TenantSee Weekly: Pandora's Office

In the end, there was hope.  We’ve been thinking lately about the myriad challenges occupiers now face in defining workplace.  For many leaders, addressing this topic is akin to opening Pandora’s Box.  Indeed, there’s a lot at stake and more ways to get it wrong than right. 

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TenantSee Weekly: What Happens When...

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TenantSee Weekly: What Happens When...

This week we’re exploring what happens when companies define their own bespoke approach to the office vs. when they default to their pre-pandemic office construct, despite significant changes in how they work.  To date, many small to mid-size organizations have chosen not to formulate a definitive new approach, instead relying on the old office design and a loosely defined hybrid approach.  In a time when the mere discussion of corporate office policy has the potential to trigger highly negative reactions among employees, it takes courage and leadership to advocate a new plan that reflects a vision for the future.  Understandably, as we’ve crept out of full pandemic mode and begun to look to the future, many companies have been uneasy about taking a definitive position.

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TenantSee Weekly: Why We Write

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TenantSee Weekly: Why We Write

Why do you get these weekly communications from us? What is TenantSee? We figured it’s time to explain a few things.

Let’s start with the second question first. TenantSee is the name we’ve given to our approach to tenant real estate services. We chose this name because we believe its important for tenants to see more. To see more what, you may ask. To see more of the big picture and the little details that make for better real estate outcomes. To see more of the data and analytics that drive good decision making. To see more transparently, the specific strategies we employ to maximize value. To de-mystify good tenant real estate. For us, the traditional approach to tenant advisory was opaque and failed to get some basic things right, exposing occupiers to an unnecessary knowledge deficit when compared to the landlord counter-party.

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TenantSee Weekly: My Landlord Offered Cash To Offset My Rent...Why?

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TenantSee Weekly: My Landlord Offered Cash To Offset My Rent...Why?

Landlords seeking to preserve future sale value have to protect the rental rate. The future sale value is tied to the building’s net operating income (“NOI”). NOI is the value achieved by deducting operating expenses and taxes from gross rent. This value is then capitalized using a cap rate to determine asset value. Hence the higher the face value of the rental rate, the greater the NOI and the higher the asset value.

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TenantSee Weekly: A Short Discussion of Operating Expenses and Taxes (Insert Big Yawn Here)

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TenantSee Weekly: A Short Discussion of Operating Expenses and Taxes (Insert Big Yawn Here)

I know. This is painful. But you need to understand it, so here goes. A third or more of a tenant’s occupancy cost is attributed to the operation and taxation of the building in which it leases space. Yet these costs and how they are distributed are often a source of confusion.