As we outlined yesterday, there is over 17 million square feet of vacant office space now spread across San Francisco, which is up from around 16 mill

Visualizing All the Vacant Office Space in San Francisco

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2021-07-19 03:00:08

As we outlined yesterday, there is over 17 million square feet of vacant office space now spread across San Francisco, which is up from around 16 million square feet of vacant space three months ago and as compared to under 5 million square feet of vacant space at the start of last year.

For context, the 1,070-foot-tall Salesforce/Transbay tower at First and Mission, which is the tallest building in San Francisco, contains 1.35 million square feet of office space spread across 59 floors.

And employing the framework we introduced last year, there is now 12.7 Salesforce Towers, or 747 Salesforce Tower floors, worth of empty office space spread across San Francisco, which is roughly enough space to accommodate between 98,000 (based on an average, pre-Covid, density) and 131,000 (a la twitter) worker bees.

This begs the question – what to do with all that empty office space. The average annual net absorption for the boom decade just ended was what? About 1.5 million feet? It would take 11 years at that absorption pace to fill the space. However, going forward it’s hard to see SF ever averaging that kind of net absorption again over a prolonged period. So it could take decades to fill the 17 million feet of empty space.