9 Bay Area Counties: Commercial Property Statistics

Having been fascinated by economics at an early age, I have always had a keen interest in knowing what is going on in the varying markets. Through the cross referencing of multiple databases such as CoStar, LandVision, Multiple Listings Service (MLS), Big Brokerage House Data, and Public and Private Investment Firms, I stay up to date with fluctuations and changes to the markets closest and relevant to me.

One of the key elements to understanding a market, whether you are a principal, broker, or speculator, is understanding what makes up the market. I have compiled the general stats of the 9 Bay Area Counties so one can better understand what is saturated and what has room for expansion. With this post, we will be ignoring the single family residential markets, isolating the focus to commercial real estate and its spaces.

• Alameda County

• San Mateo County

• Santa Clara County

• San Francisco County

For those that are unfamiliar with the 9 Bay Area Counties, they are:

• Sonoma County

• Napa County

• Solano County

• Marin County

• Contra Costa County

Santa Cruz County is close, but unfortunately it is part of the 5 Santa Cruz County subdivisions.

In terms of the 9 Bay Area Counties, there are over 144,736 properties and 15,430 spaces recorded on the online databases. There are some properties that are not recorded on these databases, but that number is fairly slim. When looking to invest in a new market or county, it is imperative to know what the competition is like as well as the market climate, drivers, and comparable properties. In this post, we are only going to be going over what is recorded and its commercial real estate asset class allocation. All the values being reported are aggregated from the previously mentioned sites, and made more reader friendly and less excel jargon by me. With a small margin of errors by properties that are not recorded in the multiple data banks, I am confident that this is a fair representation of the 9 counties. This report does not consider the size of each asset (i.e. one apartment being 300 units versus an apartment being 6 units), but is instead a holistic statistic to the 9 Bay Area Commercial Real Estate Markets.

In future posts, we will be going over the strengths, weaknesses, drivers, and possibly some predictions and forecasts of each of the 9 counties.

Ron E. Cruz