These Companies Are Trying To Shed Massive Amounts of San Francisco Office Space

Maryann Jones Thompson, San Francisco Standard
“San Francisco’s large concentration of technology-related industries and hybrid work options have shrunk demand for tenant space and led to more sublease availabilities,” says Erwin Abidog, research director at Cresa See more posts
As San Francisco struggles to get out from under its highest-ever office vacancy rate, a stagnant sublease market plays an ever-increasing role in the city’s commercial real estate crash.
 
San Francisco has the largest sublease market of any U.S. metropolitan area, with 7.2% of its overall office inventory available for sublease, having doubled that figure since late 2019. 
 
Phoenix is the only market that comes close to SF’s level of unenviable sublease supremacy, now ranking second in the country with 5.7% of its inventory in sublease.
 
“San Francisco’s large concentration of technology-related industries and hybrid work options have shrunk demand for tenant space and led to more sublease availabilities,” says Erwin Abidog, research director at Cresa, a real estate brokerage firm that specializes in representing tenants looking for space around the country. 
 
Indeed, Salesforce, Airbnb, Meta, Dropbox and Uber are the companies with the largest amount of sublease space on the market in San Francisco. Data from Cresa shows that some of that space has been listed since 2019, but a big chunk was just listed: More than 1 million square feet of subleased offices hit the market in the last quarter.
 
In total, the biggest subleases available in the city from 13 companies account for 3.5 million square feet of office space.
 
With 9.6 million square feet now available, SF has more sublease inventory than ever before—even during the period following the dot-com crash and the Great Recession, according to Cresa. And that figure has remained somewhat consistent throughout the pandemic.