homesmillbrae.com

Pinterest terminated a massive 490,000-square-foot lease at San Francisco’s unbuilt 88 Bluxome project, citing a shift toward more remote work amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The company will instead continue leasing four existing San Francisco offices, including 651 Brannan St., and pay a one-time fee of $89.5 million to cancel the Bluxome lease. The cancellation is the strongest sign yet of how the coronavirus is reducing the tech sector’s once-voracious appetite for office space.

“As we analyze how our workplace will change in a post-COVID world, we are specifically rethinking where future employees could be based,” said Todd Morgenfeld, Pinterest’s chief financial officer, in a statement. “A more distributed workforce will give us the opportunity to hire people from a wider range of backgrounds and experiences.”

Pinterest, whose users “pin” photos and websites into shareable collections and which sells advertising amid those pins, said its lease obligations for the Bluxome project would have been at least $440 million.

Numerous other companies have embraced an expansion of remote work and greater geographic diversity for their workforces. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said half of the company could work remotely within a decade. Twitter and Square, both led by Jack Dorsey, are allowing almost all employees to work remotely forever.

The trend is ominous for the Bay Area’s economy, which has received billions of dollars in taxes and real estate fees over the past decade related to new office projects, which were largely leased by tech companies.

Pinterest had the first and only lease commitment in San Francisco’s 230-acre Central South of Market district, where numerous large commercial and residential projects have been approved after the city raised height limits last year. City planners expected 30,000 new jobs and 20,000 new residents in the district by 2040, which would help fuel more than $2 billion in public benefits. That projection is now in doubt, with office workers staying home and residential rents slipping.

The million-square-foot 88 Bluxome project was set to start construction this year and replace the Bay Club San Francisco Tennis, providing benefits including land for affordable housing, a public swimming pool and replacement tennis courts.

Current plans for the project are unclear. In March, the city converted the tennis club into a temporary homeless shelter. Alexandria Real Estate Equities and TMG Partners, owners of 88 Bluxome, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Pinterest, which has 2,400 employees globally, currently has job listings in San Francisco, along with Atlanta, Chicago, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the United Kingdom.

The company reported a 4% increase in revenue to $272 million in the second quarter compared to the previous year, with global monthly average users growing 39% to 416 million in that time. The company saw recovery in its advertising business but remains unprofitable, with a $100.7 million loss in the quarter.

Former Pinterest Chief Operating Officer Francoise Brougher sued the company this month, alleging gender discrimination and citing an environment where a small number of executives close to CEO Ben Silbermann made decisions outside of formal meetings.

Roland Li is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: roland.li@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rolandlisf

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Pinterest-cancels-huge-SF-office-lease-in-unbuilt-15523170.php

Having bottomed out at the end of April, at which point they were down nearly 50 percent on a year-over-year basis, the number of homes in contract to be sold started to rebound in May; turned positive, on a year-over-year basis, back in June; and were up sharply in July.

And in fact, pending home sales activity has been up around 30 percent over the past two weeks on a year-over-year basis, which should result in strong August sales figures and reports.

But as we noted last month, at which point pending sales activity was up closer to 40 percent on a year-over-year basis, the rebound in “pent up” sales activity appears to have already plateaued.  Year-to-date sales remain down.  And with “pent up” supply continuing to outpace “pent up” demand, listed inventory remains at – or above – recession-era levels in San Francisco.

Article source: https://socketsite.com/archives/2020/08/pending-home-sales-up-30-percent-in-san-francisco-but.html

Price Point: $879,500 in Central Waterfront

Address: 1578 Indiana St., Unit 1, Central Waterfront, San Francisco.
Listing agent: Grant Edward Beggs, Sotheby’s International Realty, 415-815-9701, grant@grantbeggs.com .

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/

• A report from online real-estate marketplace Zillow suggests that there hasn’t been a big outflow of urban residents moving to the suburbs during the pandemic in most of America, although there have been widely publicized reports of a short-term flight to rural areas during the pandemic.
• However, San Francisco is an outlier, as it has had a huge spike in the number of homes listed on the market since February.
• The Zillow report suggested that this is largely from a huge number of San Franciscans trying to sell their homes without a similar uptick in people looking to buy in the city.
• One chart makes clear that the inventory of homes on the market has shot up in San Francisco, compared to other cities of a similar size.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

One of the big questions facing the real estate market in the coronavirus era is whether Americans will flee large, dense cities for theoretically more social-distancing-friendly suburbs.

According to a recent report from online real-estate marketplace Zillow, housing markets across the country haven’t seen a huge outflux from central cities to suburbia, with both urban and suburban markets acting similarly to each other across a variety of housing market metrics since the start of the pandemic.

However, San Francisco represents a big outlier in one metric: Housing inventory, or the number of homes on sale, within the city of San Francisco proper has skyrocketed by 96% since February, wildly different from similar housing markets like Miami, Boston, and Washington, DC. That spike in the central city hasn’t been matched by a shift in homes on the market elsewhere in the San Francisco metro area:

Zillow said the increase in available housing inventory in San Francisco is largely due to a lot of residents trying to sell their houses without a commensurate increase in buyers. The authors wrote, “relatively higher inventory has different causes by city, and is not clearly attributable to either supply or demand. In San Francisco, though, the softening is clear as sellers inundate the market and buyers have not changed their pace to match — newly pending sales in the city are up only 1.7% YoY.”

The big jump in homeowners trying to sell in the city proper is consistent with an upswing in people looking for homes in less densely populated parts of northern California. Business Insider’s Katie Canales reported in June that real-estate agents have seen a spike in demand for high-end houses in the Napa Valley and other less-urban regions in the Bay Area.

Read Zillow’s full report on urban and suburban housing markets in the pandemic here.

Article source: https://www.businessinsider.com/houses-for-sale-san-francisco-inventory-skyrocketing-other-cities-zillow-2020-8

Having slipped in May despite nationwide gains, the SP CoreLogic Case-Shiller Index for single-family home values within the San Francisco Metropolitan Area – which includes the East Bay, North Bay and Peninsula – slipped another 0.6 percent in June, versus an average increase of 0.6 percent nationwide, and the year-over-year gain for the index dropped to 1.4 percent.

At a more granular level, while the index for the least expensive third of the market slipped 0.5 percent in June but is still up 2.9 percent on a year-over-year basis, the index for the middle third of the market slipped 0.5 percent and its year-over-year gain dropped to 1.6 percent, and while the index for the top third of the market only slipped 0.2 percent and its year-over-year gain is down to 1.0 percent.

At the same time, the index for Bay Area condo values, which tends to be a leading indicator for the market at a whole, dropped 1.2 percent in June and is now down 0.7 percent on a year-over-year basis.

Nationally, Phoenix still leads the way in terms of indexed home price gains (up 9.0 percent on a year-over-year basis), followed by Seattle (up 6.5 percent) and Tampa (up 5.9 percent), with an average increase of 4.3 percent nationally and only Chicago (up 0.6 percent) lagging San Francisco’s 1.4 percent gain.

And having slipped 0.6 percent, San Francisco was one of only three Metro Areas to record a month-over-month drop. New York (down 0.3 percent) and Las Vegas (down 0.4 percent) were the other two.

Our standard SocketSite SP/Case-Shiller footnote: The SP/Case-Shiller home price indices include San Francisco, San Mateo, Marin, Contra Costa and Alameda in the “San Francisco” index (i.e., greater MSA) and are imperfect in factoring out changes in property values due to improvements versus

Article source: http://socketsite.com/archives/2020/08/index-for-local-home-values-slips-again-despite-nationwide-gains.html