San Francisco and Silicon Valley have long been the world’s most famous playgrounds of the tech set. Where else can you pick up a greetings card that reads ‘Congratulations on closing your latest funding round’?
Home to thousands of venture capital backed start-ups, the Bay Area attracted $24.9bn of VC investment in 2016.
But as the influx of money fuelled a massive building boom in 2012 – after a nigh-on 10-year dearth of construction nearly 150 projects were under construction in 2013, with 145 more in the pipeline – rents have soared.
For an established tech firm in the city, they now stand at around $71 per sq ft according to Savills – way ahead of most European rivals and $20 more than the US’s up-and-coming beta tech city of Austin.
It is worth keeping an eye on peripheral suburbs like Oakland and Berkeley as high prices push the entrepreneurs beyond the tech centres.
THE OCCUPIERS
The fastest-growing tech companies in Silicon Valley in 2017, according to Forbes, are Grubhub, Arista Networks, Paycom software and Ellie Mae.
The fastest-growing of the big names include Salesforce (5,870 employees in San Francisco in January 2016; 6,600 in January 2017), Uber Technologies (1,980 employees in January 2016; 3,640 in January 2017), and Airbnb (850 employees in January 2016; 1,500 in January 2017).
WHO TO KNOW
JD Lumpkin
Managing partner San Francisco office, Cushman & Wakefield
Dan Harvey
Vice president of Bay Area occupier services, CBRE
Paul Paradis
Senior managing director, Hines San Francisco
Duncan Logan
Chief executive, Rocketspace
ONE TO WATCH
Apple Park, the Norman-Foster designed $5bn Apple HQ in Cupertino, California, is scheduled for final completion by the end of the year.
The 175-acre campus is the site of the new ring-shaped building, dubbed ‘the spaceship’, is the Bay Area’s most hotly anticipated scheme.
