Outlining San Francisco’s road to recovery

With three different scenarios of 1 msf/yr, 2 msf/yr and 3 msf/yr, it would take San Francisco until 2042, 2033 or 2030 to reach under 10% total vacancy.

At the end of Q1 2024, San Francisco recorded the highest office vacancy out of any major market in the U.S. at 30.2%. With many questions being asked about how and if the city’s office market will recover, we decided to analyze how long the road to recovery could potentially take under different scenarios.

In the 10-years preceding Covid, the city experienced an average of 1.3 msf/yr of net absorption. Since 2000, San Francisco’s two highest years of net absorption were in 2005 and 2018, seeing 2.1 msf and 3.7 msf, respectively.

With three different scenarios of 1 msf/yr, 2 msf/yr and 3 msf/yr, it would take San Francisco until 2042, 2033 or 2030 to reach under 10% total vacancy based on these different rates of net absorption.

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