I’ve had a lot of questions from clients recently about the future of the real estate market around San Francisco. Some say that a lot of people are leaving the area to places like Texas to avoid taxes and COVID restrictions. While that is true for some, many of their employers that were allowing remote work have reversed course, adopting a hybrid model for employees. Companies like Apple, Facebook, and Salesforce have invested billions in infrastructure and are not willing to let their new headquarters sit empty.
Since these companies are requiring employees to come into the office, even part-time, this would imply an increase in demand for properties in the bay area as those who left temporarily return to the Bay Area. Despite the number of people that left during the pandemic, the demand for real estate in the Bay Area has not slowed down, only increased. Therefore, I anticipate even stronger demand into 2022 as companies like Salesforce and Apple re-populate their Headquarters with highly paid tech employees.
Here is a short summary of local tech companies that have decided to require in-office employees.
Salesforce
April 2021, Salesforce decided to reopen their billion dollar headquarters in a phased approach while giving employees the option to come into the office or work remotely.
Sept. 10, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff went to Twitter to offer to pay for the moving costs of any employee living in Texas after the state announced a new anti-abortion law.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he plans to spend half of the next year working remotely.
The company expects to open their offices to half capacity in September and full capacity in October. According to the Facebook careers blog, "guidance for employees is to spend at least half their time in the office."
Google wants employees to return to the office in September. The official plan is 60% of employees will work from an office a few days per week, 20% can relocate and work from new offices and the last 20% can continue to work remotely.
Apple
Apple delayed employees' return to office because of the rise in coronavirus cases around the country, workers do not need to return to the office until October, Apple said. Most recently, however, Apple postponed its return to office, and employees are now expected to go back in January 2022.
Earlier this month, the San Francisco and New York offices allowed for 50% capacity.
Uber
Uber now will be enforcing a hybrid model after gathering feedback from employees. The offices in San Francisco are operating at 20% capacity but expect to return to 100 capacity sometime in 2022. Uber also recently updated their return to office policy requiring any corporate employee to be fully vaccinated before their return.
Adobe
Based in San Jose, the software company will allow employees to work from home up to 50% of the time. In a company blog post, chief people officer Gloria Chen said, "The future of work at Adobe will be hybrid. Flexibility will be the default." It is unclear what percentage of the San Jose headquarters is open.
Yelp
On Sept. 9, the company announced it would be moving forward with a hybrid work model.
Lyft
Lyft accounted it would be allowing corporate employees to return to office in February 2022 and they must be fully vaccinated.
Airbnb
CEO Brian Chesky said he does not expect employees to return to their offices full-time until September of 2022 and "people aren’t going to be expected to come back to the office five days a week, every week."
