San Francisco's office market has continued to deteriorate this year. According to the fourth quarter report from Marcus & Millichap, office rents will fall 9% to 54.90 per square foot. This exceeds the 8.5% mean rate of rent decline last year. While the metrics don't look great, the report was optimistic that a full recovery would come to the market.

First, the bad news. The 9% dip in office rents stems from an onslaught of new office deliveries. This year, the office inventory has grown by 3.3% with 5.7 million square feet of new stocked completed. While construction is slowing, there is still a pretty substantial pipeline product underway.

The new construction activity is also putting upward pressure on the market's vacancy rate. In the fourth quarter, it will increase another 510 basis points to 20.5%. Last year, vacancy increased more than 600 basis points, and it didn't slow in 2021.

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Kelsi Maree Borland

Kelsi Maree Borland is a freelance journalist and magazine writer based in Los Angeles, California. For more than 5 years, she has extensively reported on the commercial real estate industry, covering major deals across all commercial asset classes, investment strategy and capital markets trends, market commentary, economic trends and new technologies disrupting and revolutionizing the industry. Her work appears daily on GlobeSt.com and regularly in Real Estate Forum Magazine. As a magazine writer, she covers lifestyle and travel trends. Her work has appeared in Angeleno, Los Angeles Magazine, Travel and Leisure and more.