Owners rep and property manager Micah of Metrovation in San Francisco sits down with Rofo and explains why he uses the site to list commercial space online.

What Micah likes about Rofo is that it produces quality tenant leads and is a great platform for listing spaces and connecting with prospective tenants online.

Interview
I’m Micah Bycel, I work for Metrovation. I’m an owners rep and property manager.

Is Rofo a good marketing tool?

Yeah, Rofos been great. It’s given us an ability to outsource part of our obligation in terms of getting our listings out to the world. We’ve found Rofo to be extremely reliable in putting our listings out there.

Does rofo generate quality leads?

Yeah, I think the first three leads we got, two of the three closed deals with us.

Is Rofo.com easy to use?

Absolutely, I mean the interface is really easy to use, so uploading the listings and everything is really easy and then its sort of taken over from there which is great. So, in terms of how it works in the deal, we’ve found it to be very clear and easy.

Does the Rofo craigslist flyer work well?

Yeah, I mean I think Rofo does a good job of walking that line between too fancy and you know, just sort of random text in craigslist. And so I think it presents a presentable flyer, but that doesn’t overload you with information that people don’t care about, and makes it very easy to read.

The future of commercial leasing?

Yeah, I think the commercial real estate world in general has been slow on the uptake in terms of technology changes. I think Rofo is probably at the forefront of it, we’ve been posting on craigslist for a long time, but I think what we’re doing now with Rofo in our overall strategy is sort of figuring out where are the leads going to come from. For example, is Rofo going to take care of internet leads, and the brokers will take care of leads from the brokerage community. I guess the short answer is I still think its just all getting sorted our right now.

Would you recommend Rofo?

Yeah, definitely. We’re using it as part of our platform to get our listings out. We still rely primarily on our brokers to list a space, to get it out in the brokerage community, to do tours and to bring us deals. But, we’ve found Rofo to be a really reliable component to our leasing strategy.

Retail is a tough space to be right now. In the past year the sector was hammered by the down economy, leaving many retail commercial spaces vacant. With all this prime window space available there have been some creative ideas on what to do with it.

One that is catching on is placing advertising in vacant storefronts. This helps generate revenue from a vacant space to offset rent that isn’t being collected. It produces a strange phenomenon with the survivors of the downturn plastering their wares all over the remains of the fallen. According to this New York Times article, it costs about $500 a month to rent a storefront for advertising purposes. That being quite a deal since a comparable billboard in some urban markets can cost as much as $50,000.

If a store owner can’t find an advertiser to lease their window, there are throngs of artists waiting to populate it with their work. In San Francisco, there has been a recent push to revitalize the downtown thoroughfare of Market St. with creative ideas such as art in store fronts, reduced traffic and more space for pedestrians and bicycles. BetterMarketStreet.org is chronicling the attmpted transformation.

Mistletoe on Powell Street from ISHOTHIM on Vimeo.

It was as recent as last summer that the thought of leasing a cool office space in Jackson Square for a reasonable rent was near impossible.

Fast forward to 2009 and the world has changed. We recently filmed this office space at 480 Pacific Avenue in San Francisco. If you have a need for a space to fit 20 people this one is well worth a visit.

More and more landlords are using video to help entrepreneurs qualify spaces.  We are seeing much faster results for commercial real listings with video than without.  It makes sense.  There’s a lot of space on the market for lease and who has time to go and look at it all.  Check out this example of San Jose office space on Rofo.

Rofo was recently included in a story about the market for San Francisco office space.  The story line is still the same - doom and gloom for the landlords and professionals who rely on commercial real estate transactions to make money.  To sum it up: as a business/entrepreneur you are in the driver’s seat.  You can now succeed at getting a short term deal, cheaper rents and other concessions like free rent and allowances.  But obviously the deals are attractive because the overall business climate is in the dumps.  So what to do?  If you have a lease expiring in the next 12 months now is a good time to start evaluating your options.  Just like its a very good time to hire its also a very good time to either negotiate and lock in a low rent in your current office space or shop around and upgrade your diggs.

San Francisco Commercial Real Estate is a Buyer’s Market in Downturn from VidSF on Vimeo.

We are at a point of transformation…and dreaming and creating change is the American way. Many store and restaurant closing were announced for January.  San Francisco restaurants brought 35 closings in January. Yet many establishments continue to have lines out the door at lunch, and 45-minute waits for dinner. Many companies are using the economic downturn as a moment to take overdue action. Upon announcing a 7,000 job cut overhaul, Macy’s chairman Terry J. Lungren said, “Now I think is the time to address all of those structural changes that are required.”

Comparisons have been made to the sluggish economy of the ‘70s. When you think about it, that counter-culture era produced some pretty cool and long-lasting concepts: Apple, Southwest Airlines, Genentech, Microsoft. Concepts emerged then that were willing to experiment with alternative ways of doing business while incorporating proven fundamentals, like: Banana Republic, Body Shop, Whole Foods, Urban Outfitters, Dean and Deluca and Quiksilver. We got some great music out of it too: jazz fusion (Weather Report), jazz funk (Herbie Hancock), psychedelic funk (Sly and the Family Stone, etc.)…and Prince. Hollywood took a risk on an untested director with the Godfather. Oh…and the food revolution started by the little restaurant in Berkeley - Chez Panisse.

Consumers are looking to make meaningful purchases with their disposable income…and this gives rise to the new ideas and growing concepts we see coming our way. While a significant part of the retail downturn is due to the financial meltdown, a contributing piece is that there was just too much disposable look-alike junk in the market—quite different from the emerging trends of green and long-lasting ‘feel good’ purchasing.

While San Francisco retail space is experiencing its share of retail and hospitality downturn, as a leader in counter-culture, it bucked retail rent and vacancy trends with year end 2008 retail vacancy down to 2 percent and average asking rents ending up 5.6 percent to $40 psf. The downturn ignites the creative innovation for new concepts to emerge as entrepreneurs turn unemployment into opportunity. We are seeing a continued rise in interest from food (it is the Bay Area!), fitness, wine bars, self improvement and green-themed local concepts.

Bay Area unemployment is up. Bay Area officials have requested $6 billion of infrastructure projects that would generate nearly 27,000 jobs from the economic stimulus package now moving through Congress. The Bay Area hopes to move in new directions through investments in transit and walkable, sustainable communities, instead of the suburban sprawl infrastructure of the past.

Rhonda Diaz is Vice President of the Urban Retail Group at Terranomics

No matter if you are an entrepreneur, a startup business, a small business or work for a larger corporation in a satellite office location, executive office suites are often the best solution for your office space needs.  Executive suites offer turn-key services beyond the office space and furniture.  They often have mail services, secretarial services, voice and data services as well as shared conference rooms, kitchens and break rooms.

While you often pay a higher rent for these office suites they also tend to include many products and services and eliminate the ‘hassle factor’ of coordinating those services.  Also, they tend to offer monthly lease terms which can be a huge benefit especially when your business is new and the future is unknown.

Rofo has aggregated all of the executive suite office spaces in one place in order for you to do a real side by side comparison for the best space, location, amenities and services for your business.

We have more and more landlords and sublandlords taking advantage of our video marketing features on Rofo.  Frankly, there is no better way to search for office space and commercial real estate than to sit back and watch a video tour.  This is a great example of a video of a San Jose Office Space.

I’m writing about the San Francisco Bay Area real estate market but you could probably insert any city name.  I’m asked often these days, “What is really happening in the commercial real estate markets?” There’s certainly been a lot of news coverage on the macro level so I thought I’d offer up some specific anecdotes and try to piece it together with some conversations I had this week.

Institutional Landlord: “We do not anticipate signing any new leases through the end of the year.”

Top Broker: “Business is dead.  We’re trying to renew deals that are 18 months out.”

REIT: “If you’re a sizable credit tenant we’d give you just about anything you ask for.  And, if you’ve invested in our fund you’re probably not very happy with us.”

Tech Company: “We just cut our staff in half, froze capital spending and preserving cash.”

Broker: “I heard Myspace and Microsoft are both in the market for significant expansion space.”

Angel Investor: “Due diligence on investment deals is taking twice as long.”

Large Developer: “2009 looks a lot worse than 2008.  And we’re flat lining now. It will be a great year to buy on the cheap.”

So what does this all mean?  Well capitalized landlords and developers will take advantage of a down market in which tenants with credit and good visibility will dictate the leasing terms.

This San Francisco space listing was recently added to Rofo.  Our office is located very close to this building (the home of Jack Falstaff Restaurant).  Knowing that this location and size are hard to come by, I would think this space would be appealing to many businesses trying to set up shop in the area.