I don't know about outside of America but according to comparable reports from the firm Cushman & Wakefield, Austin boasts 15.7 million square feet vacant, a rate of 25%. The same firm has SF marked at 27% vacant.

I have never been sure if HN is invested in commenting on SF real estate because they disproportionately live here, or because they live elsewhere and get a warped news feed that has an interest in portraying SF in a negative light.

Vast undercount -- probably for every city. Commercial financing has convenants which require minimum occupancy, landlords are heavily incentivized to keep tenants on the books even if they're not actually using the space.

Know personally of startups in SF which have been discouraged from cutting their lease and paying a penalty so that the landlord can keep occupancy #s high. Of course, there are sweeteners involved to keep them "occupying" the space when in reality they moved out >6 months ago. They'll be in the space for years to come...

Yes, that's why I prefer to compare using the Cushman & Wakefield stats that have a consistent methodology.

> I have never been sure if HN is invested in commenting on SF real estate because they disproportionately live here, or because they live elsewhere and get a warped news feed that has an interest in portraying SF in a negative light.

Why not both?

According to the chart in this article from April SF had the highest available office space of US major cities but no by a large margin. https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2023/04/24/office-...

22.9% of SF office space was available. Houston 22.2%, Dallas 20.9%, Chicago 19.6% and DC 19.2%.

I wonder how fudged are those numbers. I know of a town with tons of idle hotel space yet they report an occupancy rate of 65%, which is within a few percent of the typical range of 70%-90%. I suspect some empty properties are listed as "under renovation" even though no work is being done.

If they are fudged, they are likely to be fudged across all markets.

I reckon SF was hit particularly hard because it has a heavy concentration in tech compared with other large US cities, and tech workers have most avidly embraced wfh?

This article does this exact type of # of notable building's worth of empty space for other US cities: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/10/opinion/nyc-o...