Saturday, December 7, 2013

Saturday Stats: Santa Clara County Leading Bay Area Commercial Boom

There are a lot of cranes in the air and buzz about the office market in San Francisco, but the reality is that Santa Clara County is leading the Bay Area in commercial real estate construction with $2.1 billion worth of activity. While this beats San Francisco by 10%, keep in mind it is much cheaper to build offices in the South Bay than up North, so the variance by square footage is likely much greater. Also the $1.3 billion 49ers stadium is not factored into this figure. We'll also see how things go in 2014 and 2015 when developers start hitting the hard cap the city of San Francisco has set on new office construction.

In total, the entire Bay Area will top the $6 billion new commercial construction record set way back in the year 2000. It seems things are recovering nicely in our local economy.

2013 Commercial Construction Activity

Santa Clara County: $2.1 billion
San Francisco County: $1.9 billion
San Mateo County: $765 million
Alameda + Contra Costa Counties: $681 million

Source: SocketSite

Samsung's New US Headquarters in San Jose

10 comments:

  1. Interesting but not a fair comparison. Santa Clara Co has 27x the land mass and 15 cities compared to 1 city.

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  2. I don't think think land mass really matters since this comparison is by cost. Population and square footage would paint a better metric, however. We have just about double the population in Santa Clara County, but the cost to build office campuses here is around half (I think actually less than half) per SQFT than what it costs in SF. So office development per capita should be equal or even more favorable to Santa Clara.

    SF has also allowed so much development because of there has been almost nothing built since the 2008 depression. After making up for all those years they are going to be hit with a hard cap of office development which is far less than what is being built this year.

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    1. Josh, I wonder if you would be open to posting about the current Ohlone project problems. I'd be curious to see what folks think - is republic just posturing, what should the city do, etc

      http://m.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/12/06/ohlone-a-transformational-san-jose.html?page=2&r=full

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    2. Yes planning on it. Will likely go up tomorrow. Have a HUGE backlog of posts at the moment.

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  3. The tiny area of SF managed almost $2B? Wow!

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  4. Boy will those numbers change when Samsung, Apple, and Google start building their new campuses

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  5. PF Changs is closing in downtown next month.

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    1. Damn, bad news. May also be an opportunity for something better. I was really sad when E&O trading company shut down, but Nemea is a huge improvement and perhaps the best Greek restaurant in San Jose.

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  6. I live a block from both. PF Changs is a nasty chain. Nemea is pretty full, but mostly inconsistent.

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