To compare this to other costs, renting two floors of the WeWork, which we did for most of the summer last year, cost around $1.2M/yr for 14,000 sq. ft. of office space. The Rose Garden has 20,000 sq. ft. of floor space and 20,000 additional sq. ft. of usable outdoor space for less implied annual cost than that.
I’m sympathetic to the high-level claim that owning property usually beats renting if you’re committing for a long time period. But the comparison with WeWork seems odd: WeWork specializes in providing short-term, serviced office space and does so at a substantial premium to the more traditional long-term, unserviced commercial real estate contract. When we were looking for office space in Berkeley earlier this year we were seeing list price between $3.25-$3.75/month per square foot, or $780k-900k/year for 20,000 square feet. I’d expect with negotiation you could get somewhat better pricing than this implies, especially if committing to a longer time period.
Of course, the extra outdoor space, mixed-use zoning and ability to highly customize the space may well offset this. But it starts depending a lot more on the details (e.g. how often is the outdoor space used; how much more productive are people in a customized space vs a traditional office) than it might first seem.
When we were looking for office space in Berkeley earlier this year we were seeing list price between $3.25-$2.75/month per square foot, or $780k-900k/year for 20,000 square feet.
Very small nitpick, but did you mean $3.25-$3.75? (This was the smallest diff I could think of to make your calculation clear).
When we were looking for office space in Berkeley earlier this year we were seeing list price between $3.25-$2.75/month per square foot, or $780k-900k/year for 20,000 square feet. I’d expect with negotiation you could get somewhat better pricing than this implies, especially if committing to a longer time period.
Yep, if you commit for longer time periods you can definitely get better deals, and there are definitely other ways to save on office space costs. I didn’t mean to imply this was the minimum you could rent office space for.
The $1.2M/yr estimate was roughly what we were paying at the time, and as such was the central comparison point we had. Comparing it to something more like $800k-$900k a year also seems reasonable to me, though I have less experience with the exact tradeoffs faced by doing that. One reason for that comparison is that the price estimate I did in the comment above included utilities and servicing the space, and I don’t have a ton of experience with how much cost that adds to an unserviced office lease, though I still expect it to be a bunch lower than the WeWork prices.
I’m sympathetic to the high-level claim that owning property usually beats renting if you’re committing for a long time period. But the comparison with WeWork seems odd: WeWork specializes in providing short-term, serviced office space and does so at a substantial premium to the more traditional long-term, unserviced commercial real estate contract. When we were looking for office space in Berkeley earlier this year we were seeing list price between $3.25-$3.75/month per square foot, or $780k-900k/year for 20,000 square feet. I’d expect with negotiation you could get somewhat better pricing than this implies, especially if committing to a longer time period.
Of course, the extra outdoor space, mixed-use zoning and ability to highly customize the space may well offset this. But it starts depending a lot more on the details (e.g. how often is the outdoor space used; how much more productive are people in a customized space vs a traditional office) than it might first seem.
Very small nitpick, but did you mean $3.25-$3.75? (This was the smallest diff I could think of to make your calculation clear).
Yes, thanks for spotting my typo! ($2.75 psf isn’t crazy for Berkeley after negotiation, but is not something I’ve ever seen as a list price.)
Yep, if you commit for longer time periods you can definitely get better deals, and there are definitely other ways to save on office space costs. I didn’t mean to imply this was the minimum you could rent office space for.
The $1.2M/yr estimate was roughly what we were paying at the time, and as such was the central comparison point we had. Comparing it to something more like $800k-$900k a year also seems reasonable to me, though I have less experience with the exact tradeoffs faced by doing that. One reason for that comparison is that the price estimate I did in the comment above included utilities and servicing the space, and I don’t have a ton of experience with how much cost that adds to an unserviced office lease, though I still expect it to be a bunch lower than the WeWork prices.