Bay Area Office, Retail Rents Expected to Drop Due to COVID-19

KRON4-TV (July 29, 2020) You can see the effect of the pandemic in a video shoot at lunchtime in downtown San Francisco — no hustle and no bustle. Many storefronts are boarded up, or gated shut and lots of windows have for lease signs posted. The cost of renting office and retail space is expected to get cheaper, relative to inflation over the next three years because of coronavirus. That’s according to a survey of Bay Area and southern California commercial developers conducted by the Allen Matkins/UCLA Anderson Forecast. “When you think of a pandemic, it literally is something like a tidal wave and it comes through and it clears out a lot of stuff,” John Tipton said. “It clears out weaker stuff that was just barely hanging on and in some cases it knocks down some good things that quite frankly would’ve just been just fine but for the title wave of the pandemic.” Watch the Segment