San Francisco Market Update: Tech, Life Sciences Lead Construction Activity

As of July, the Bay Area office markets had 11.8 million square feet of office space under construction, an uptick of 8.3 percent month-over-month, CommercialEdge data shows. Year-over-year, the pipeline shrunk by 15.1 percent—as in July 2020, office space under construction totaled 13.9 million square feet.

The San Francisco-Peninsula market had roughly 3.8 million square feet of new office space slated for delivery this year, while the East and South Bay market had more than 4.8 million square feet. Most of the largest projects currently underway in both Bay Area markets started construction in 2019 or earlier, like the Google Charleston East project, started in 2017 and totaling 595,000 square feet in Mountain View.

Besides the large tech campuses of Google, nVidia, Microsoft, and others, life sciences and R&D space is also making up a significant portion of the construction pipeline. High-quality office space represents a common denominator between the various requirements in the market and takes up a large portion of the construction pipeline. Over the first six months, the dollar value of construction starts in metro San Francisco increased by 114 percent year-over-year.

A single property came online, totaling 172,740 square feet—61 percent less than the 450,594 square feet delivered in July 2020—, the new corporate headquarters building of Fortinet in Sunnyvale. The office building implements several technologies and design elements aimed at minimizing its carbon footprint. There are five other projects currently underway in Sunnyvale submarkets, totaling more than 782,000 square feet.

Of the total under construction pipeline, 3.1 million square feet of office space is comprised in projects that broke ground this year. Submarkets with high construction activity include South San Francisco, with its 2.6 million square feet underway—mostly life sciences projects—, the SoMa submarket of San Francisco, which had projects totaling over 1.8 million square feet, and San Jose’s CBD, which had office construction volume at around 2.6 million square feet.

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