My startup actually just got some really awesome free office space in the ground floor of a building where the company went from 100 people to four. They are still paying 40k a month on the lease and have a year and a half left, so one of the employees is just letting us work there until someone else leases the space. It's pretty amazing though; right now my office is actually a conference room surrounded on two sides by glass and overlooking a duck pond.
The article left out the fact that most of this commercial real estate excess is left over from the dot com bust. At the height of prosperity between the bust and the most recent financial trouble the vacancy rate was still around 16% compared to the 21% it is now. And unless you get somewhat lucky, most owners in the valley still make more money by only partially leasing their building at a higher cost than fully leasing it at relatively low prices. So, while you may here a few stories of people getting decent lease rates they are the small minority.<p>And I don't see how they article or title infers anything about the state of tech as others have mentioned other than that it says Silicon Valley. While this term is typically used to describe the tech industry in the area it has become a more generic term for the south bay. The article makes it clear that it is a real estate problem and that some tech companies are benefiting from the over-speculation.
This seems to me like a unique opportunity for next-gen startup incubators and the coworking movement to lease space at rates that would enable startup entrepreneurs to use the kind of digs that are normally completely outside of their reach.
I'm not sure this isn't still a leftover from the original dot-com era bust and the existing real estate bubble issues.<p>This doesn't seem like a reflection on the state of tech in Silicon Valley (which the title infers) but the state of over-speculation in area commercial real-estate.<p>This is a good thing for tech companies.
"Commercial property foreclosures will at least double in 2010 and job growth won't return for two years after that, held back by U.S. consumers who are saving more and 'getting back in line with sustainable spending habits,' Haveman said."<p>That suggests that the return to a boom economy is still a long way off, as commercial property investments absorb a lot of capital, and bearing those losses will cause many spending cutbacks throughout the economy.