San Francisco’s luxury homes are attracting eager buyers. 

Mark Calvey
Senior Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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Don’t be surprised if you hear your real estate agent and mortgage lender suddenly belt out a rendition of “Happy Days are Here Again.”

Luxury home values in the Bay Area and other key California cities are chalking up their biggest gains since the housing boom went bust in the last decade.

Bay Area luxury home values soared 6.6 percent in the second quarter, the biggest year-over-year gain since the first quarter of 2006.

And Bay Area luxury home values rose 2.9 percent from the first quarter of 2012. The average luxury home in San Francisco is now $2.67 million, according to the First Republic Prestige Home Index produced by First Republic Bank and Fiserv CSW Inc. (NASDAQ: FISV)

“We have a hot market right now,” said Jay Costello, president of Hill Co. in San Francisco. “We’re going to see price increases over the next three to five years.”

Or at least until the Nasdaq makes a U-turn.

Real estate agents point to the strength of the stock market in driving Bay Area home prices since so many of the region’s affluent residents own stocks and options tied to publicly traded companies or private companies that will one day go public or be acquired, or so they hope.

The Nasdaq was approaching an 11-year high this week, thanks largely to shares of Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) hitting a record high Monday on news of its patent-litigation victory against Samsung.

On the luxury home front, First Republic had more good news. California’s strengthening economy, which first emerged in the Bay Area, is now evident in luxury home values in Los Angeles and San Diego.

Los Angeles values increased 2.4 percent from a year ago and jumped 4.3 percent from this year’s first quarter, marking the biggest quarterly gain since the third quarter of 2005, when the national housing boom was in full swing. The average luxury home value in the L.A. area is now $2.04 million.

Mark Calvey covers banking and finance for the San Francisco Business Times.

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Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2012/08/san-francisco-real-estate-home-prices.html

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Riverbed Technology will relocate
to floors two through six
at 680 Folsom St. with
a 10-year lease term.

(Mark Your Calendars: RealShare REAL ESTATE 2012, March 22^nd in Los Angeles).

SAN FRANCISCO-TMG Partners and financial partner Rockwood Capital LLC have signed a 167,788-square-foot lease to relocate Riverbed Technology to 680 Folsom St., a class A office building in San Francisco’s South of Market District near the Moscone Convention Center. Riverbed, currently at 199 Fremont St., will move into floors two through six at 680 Folsom St. with a 10-year lease term.

David Churton, headquarter practice leader and international director at Jones Lang LaSalle, represented the tenant. He points out that the Riverbed real estate team “took a very strategic approach to their future real estate requirements.” He explains that by being proactive, “they executed a headquarters strategy ahead of today’s constricted market and netted a superb block of quality space offering the flexibility to accommodate growth as well as excellent terms and prominent signage in what will be the finest redevelopment in San Francisco in the last decade.”

According to Mayor Ed Lee of San Francisco, “Riverbed’s long term commitment to keep their worldwide headquarters in San Francisco through 2024 demonstrates once again that we are the location of choice for high tech companies. With dynamic leaders like Riverbed’s Jerry Kennelly, we are making San Francisco the ‘Innovation Capitol of the World.’”

According to a recently tech report from JLL, San Francisco is the top high-tech industry growth market with the most impacted office market. Booming high-tech industry employment growth of more than 15 percent is creating strong demand for office space and has boosted rents 18.5 percent over the past 12 months. Stiff competition between tenants for the best quality space is moving market rents toward pre-recession highs in some buildings and causing high-tech firms that prefer South of Market Street to head north into the CBD. The excitement has drifted into the capital markets space and investors are snapping up properties at rates last seen in 2007. The resurgence in high-tech is electrifying not only San Francisco, but the entire Bay Area.

According to Michael Covarrubias, chairman and CEO of TMG Partners, “Riverbed is the ideal tenant not only for this space, but to complement the increasing tech growth in San Francisco’s SoMa area.” GlobeSt.com could not get further lease terms, like aggregate lease value, asking rent or taking rent by deadline. An unidentified source not involved in the deal says base rent is approximately $50 to $54 per square foot per annum.

According to Riverbed co-founder and CEO Kennelly, “we think the City is the right location to attract the best talent and provide a thriving environment for our current employees. Moving to a state of the art building in the heart of the City will be a great move for our company.”

With construction now underway, the 12-story mid-rise tower at 680 Folsom St. and adjacent three -story building at 50 Hawthorne St. will be fully renovated to Class A standards. The $87-million renovation, supported by TMG and set for completion in late 2013, calls for 680 Folsom St.’s existing 1960′s concrete exterior to be replaced with a clear glass curtain wall skin.

In addition, a two-story vertical addition and several small horizontal additions will also be added to the building, “increasing the gross building area by more than 100,000 square feet for a total of approximately 522,000 square feet,” according to a prepared statement.

All building systems will be replaced and a new public plaza will be built on the corner of Folsom and Third streets, where there eventually will be a new 15,000-square-foot retail or cultural building constructed, says the release. A new glass, steel and granite lobby will have 30-foot ceilings with floor-to-ceiling glass and a floating staircase. The property is pursuing LEED Gold certification.

Pacific Bell owned and occupied the headquarters facility until 2007. In October 2010, TMG recapitalized the development with a new equity partner in Rockwood Capital.

Categories:

West,
Office,
Leasing,
San Francisco

Natalie Dolce Natalie Dolce, editor of the West Coast region for GlobeSt.com and Real Estate Forum, is responsible for coverage of news and information pertaining to that vital real estate region. Prior to moving out to the Southern California office, Natalie was Northeast bureau chief, covering New York City for GlobeSt.com. Dolce?s background includes a stint at InStyle Magazine, and as managing editor with New York Press, an alternative weekly New York City paper. In her career, she has also covered a variety of beats Arthur Frommer?s Budget Travel magazine, FashionLedge.com, Co-Ed magazine, and has also freelanced for a number of publications including MSNBC.com and Museums New York magazine. Contact Natalie Dolce.

Article source: http://www.globest.com/news/12_280/sanfrancisco/office/87M-Renovated-Building-Gets-First-167788-SF-Tenant-318417.html

Updated March 8, 2011 at 1:56 p.m.

New Census figures released Tuesday show dramatic changes in the Bay Area over the last decade, with rapid population growth in Contra Costa County, an African-American exodus from Oakland, and a surge in the number of Asians living in Silicon Valley.

The nine-county region reached a population of 7.15 million people, the Census showed.

Contra Costa County Grows the Fastest

Contra Costa County grew by more than 100,000 people over the past decade, making it the fastest-growing in the Bay Area on both an absolute and percentage basis. 

Observers say most of that growth occurred in the eastern parts of the county, like Antioch and Brentwood, where acres of cherry orchards and corn fields were bulldozed to make room for new subdivisions.

Unlike most of the Bay Area, where the African-American population dropped, the black population in Contra Costa County grew.

“A lot of people moved out from Oakland, including members of my family,” said Paul Cobb, publisher of the African-American weekly, the Oakland Post.

“Single mothers with latchkey kids moved out there because they didn’t want to have to worry about drugs and crime,” Cobb said.

Steve Spiker, research director for the Oakland-based Urban Strategies Council, said Contra Costa County’s population growth would have appeared even greater if it was measured before the real estate bubble burst and the foreclosure crisis began.

“A lot of these folks were foreclosed on while the census was being conducted,” Spiker said. ”It’s unclear how many of them were missed.”

Oakland Shrinks

Among California’s 20 largest cities, Oakland was one of only two to shrink between 2000 and 2010 (Santa Ana was the other). Census figures show the East Bay city lost 8,760 residents over the past decade.

During the course of the decade, nearly 40,000 African-Americans left Oakland, the data shows, while the numbers of white, Asian and Hispanic residents increased.

The population loss came despite the building of thousands of new condo units, part of former Mayor Jerry Brown’s much-ballyhooed “10K Plan” to reinvigorate downtown Oakland.

“A lot of people came, but a lot of people also left,” Cobb said.

San Francisco Becomes More Asian

Like Oakland, San Francisco also saw an exodus of African-Americans, but this was more than offset by growth in the city’s  the city’s Asian population — which rose by more than 30,000 even as the numbers of blacks and Latinos dropped.

Overall, the city’s population grew by 3.7 percent to 805,235 residents between 2000 and 2010.

“The Asian community is growing everywhere [in San Francisco] — the Excelsior, Portola, Visitacion Valley,” said Max Kirkeberg, a professor emeritus of geography at San Francisco State University.

Ling-chi Wang, a professor emeritus in the ethnic studies department at the University of California, Berkeley, predicted the numbers would continue to grow as the visibility of San Francisco’s Asian community increased after the appointment of Edwin M. Lee as its first Chinese-American mayor.

Many Asian Americans are also moving into newly built condos in the South Beach and Mission Bay neighborhoods, he said, fueled by the biotech campus of the University of California, San Francisco, which is still under construction.

The number of whites in the city rose by a modest 5,000.

San Jose Nears 1 Million Residents

San Jose remained the Bay Area’s largest city, growing to 945,942 residents in 2010. Unlike San Francisco and Oakland, where the white population grew, San Jose saw its number of Caucasian residents drop.

In the meantime, the number of Asian residents skyrocketed, buoyed, observers say, by new immigrants from China and India who are moving to Silicon Valley for jobs in the tech sector.

“The Silicon Valley industries have used the H-1B visa to create its new economy and so new bridges have been built between San Jose and Bangalore,” said Raj Jayadev, director of Silicon Valley Debug.

According to the census, San Jose had 303,138 Asian residents in 2010 — approximately 35,000 more than San Francisco.

“These are folks in technology jobs, they’re engineers, they’re scientists, they’re entrepreneurs” said Russell Hancock, the president and CEO of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, a public-private collaborative that brings together government and business leaders in the South Bay.

“The census proves San Jose is among the most cosmopolitan cities in the country, more so than San Francisco,” Hancock said.

With more than 1.7 million residents, Santa Clara County remained the region’s most populous as it added 99,057 residents.

Article source: http://www.baycitizen.org/census-2010/story/what-census-tells-us-about-bay-area/comments/