San Diego's post-pandemic office vacancy spike
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San Diego's office vacancy rate is up nearly 25% since 2019, a trend that worsened as pandemic-era changes disrupted white-collar work in America.
Why it matters: One downtown office high-rise is going through foreclosure, another is undergoing a costly conversion to residences, and a $1.6 billion life-sciences campus is poised to open without any biotech tenants as San Diego's office market adjusts to a new reality.
By the numbers: San Diego's office vacancy rate hit 19.6% in June, according to Moody's. That's up from 15.7% at the end of 2019, just before COVID-19 led to widespread work from home.
- That pales in comparison to San Francisco, where the vacancy rate jumped from 8.8% in 2019 to 21% last month.
The big picture: The national vacancy rate reached 20.1% in the second quarter — the highest it's been since at least 1979, when Moody's began tracking it.
What we're watching: The glut of vacant office space is expected to only get worse, with 1.7 million square feet of space about to hit the market with the Research and Development District, or RaDD, and another 600,000 square feet of space coming from the Horton Plaza redevelopment.