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Comment by kmlx | Hacker News Reader

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kmlx

> Vacancy rates for commercial real estate are what 20-30%?

US doesn't look great:

Office Vacancy Rates by City:

1. San Francisco: 31%

2. Los Angeles: 26%

3. Chicago: 24%

4. Phoenix: 24%

5. Cleveland: 23%

6. Denver: 22%

7. Philadelphia: 19%

8. Boston: 19%

9. Houston: 19%

10. Austin: 19%

11. New York: 17%

12. Dallas: 17%

13. Miami: 16%

14. Detroit: 13%

15. Seattle: 11%

from https://twitter.com/KobeissiLetter/status/166608978195110707...

but other places, like London UK, are getting back on track:

> This reflected a total vacancy rate of 8.9% and remained above the 10-year average of 5.5%

from https://www.jll.co.uk/en/trends-and-insights/research/q1-202...

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Also, in US, landlords outside of huge metro areas and non class A buildings in metro, are throwing out crazy TI credits and building offices for free for a lease. So if you are looking for an office because you have some portion of the workforce that prefers it. A great time to get a new office built out for free, on a very cheap lease. I have clients that are having entire floors redone for free because they just mentioned cancellation/renegotiation of a lease.

For anyone not in the real estate market, "TI" here is "tenant improvement" and basically means all the construction that the owner does to configure the space to the needs of whoever is leasing it

Knowing how NYC real estate operates, I'm willing to bet that 17% wildly under estimates the true numbers of what we'd consider 'office space'.

Its not doing great. I know that people that are still holding offices are getting their pick of the litter right now.

"The company below left, so we added their space to the lease and got all the furniture, for 10% of the rate"

"Sub tenant left so we got a great deal on taking over their space as is"

this and this

"We have extra space because 70% are WFH would you like to sub lease it we have 3 other companies here and all the infra setup, plus our break room is nice"

Buildings reporting the empty spaces as being turned / under construction to juke up occupancy rates. All matter of BS to pump numbers. I am not even in the industry and I've seen this stuff first hand.

Slightly related, not sure why Atlanta is left out of many statistics like this. Atlanta's metro population is bigger than most of those cities.

Maybe because the city of Atlanta itself is number 38 by population in the US?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

But indeed, its metro area seems to be number 8 in the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area

A quick search suggests it has a commercial vacancy rate of around 22-24%:

https://atlanta.urbanize.city/post/report-late-2022-office-i...

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