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SAN FRANCISCO-Confirmation that San Jose and San Francisco are among the top metro areas in the US in jobs production came during a recent Northern California Investor Symposium held by Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services.

Nearly 400 attendees were in attendance at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in downtown San Francisco's Union Square to hear the annual Bay Area forecast, presented by Hessam Nadji, the firm's managing director of Research and Advisory Services. According to Nadji, the entire Bay Area region, including the Oakland metro, is generating an average of 100,000 jobs a year and is expected to keep up that growth rate for the next several years.

“The high-tech jobs that have come back to us are very different from the dot.com boom,” Nadji said. “These are very profitable companies that are dominating the age of e-commerce and electronic servicing, which is what the jobs are about.”

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Nadji also said that while large institutional investors dominated the acquisition activity early on in the current recovery, private investors have returned to the market in the last 18 months. While some 20,000 new apartment units are slated for completion in the Bay Area over the next several years, Nadji said that demand is strong enough to support both the for-sale housing and apartment markets.

“In the Bay Area over the next five years, we should add somewhere around 90,000 18- to 34-year-olds. Where are they going to live? There is a lot of pressure on the demand side,” he said.

In other property sectors, Nadji expects a strong local office market through at least 2015. And despite the erosion of internet and online sales, retail properties, particularly those in the value-add category, present solid investments, he added.

The event, hosted by Jeffrey Mishkin, Marcus & Millichap first vice president and regional manager, also featured a panel discussion focused on the recent passage of a new San Francisco city ordinance that requires seismic upgrades to city structures known as “soft-story buildings.” The term refers to properties that include multiple stories of housing above a ground-floor parking garage.

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Symposium panelists spoke at length to the new “soft-story” ordinance, which addresses wood-frame buildings constructed before 1978 with five or more housing units. The panel featured Patrick Otellini, director of Earthquake Safety for the City and County of San Francisco; Mark Barbagelata, owner of Seismic Retrofitters; Ned Fennie, president of Fennie + Mehl Architects; and Homy Sikaroudi, principal of West Coast Premier Construction Inc.

Most of the 5,000 buildings that fit the description are rent-controlled apartments, according to the city. Otellini said that about 3,000 of the buildings will need to be retrofitted at a cost of about $60,000 to $130,000 each, and building owners must complete the improvements within the next seven years.

“The soft-story retrofit is a way to keep people in their homes, not dislocated to a shelter away from the city,” he said. “After an earthquake, if your housing stock is depleted, people leave the city and don't come back.”