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Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

This is mainly a concern for one year leases that were renewed this March/April/May, which won't be renewed in 2021. There are many companies which budgeted for a few weeks or months of work from home, now they're transitioning permanently and the office space they were using is no longer needed.

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One year leases on commercial office real estate?!? That's unheard of around here (Boston). You'll be lucky if you find a commercial landlord who will rent to you for 5 years instead of the more usual 7, 10 or 20.

Subleases are a different story, of course.

Sorry for my lack of semantic nuance. Most of the leasers rely on payments from their subletters to pay their leases, so the effects will translate over in either case, just with more "buffer time".

There are also a fair amount of 1-year direct commercial leases, depending on the area.

>This is mainly a concern for one year leases that were renewed this March/April/May, which won't be renewed in 2021

Do leases tend to get renewed in Q2?

It depends on when the lease was signed. AFAIK there's a pretty even distribution between quarters. Here's an article from this year (2020) about notable leases signed in Q2: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2020/07/10/six-nota....

If they signed a 12 month lease in Q2, then yes.

A 12 month lease for commercial real estate in SF?

That's not uncommon. Our office in North Beach was a 12-month deal. In fact, contracts tend to be longer (24 months or so).

I think that was the point. 12 months is atypically short.

Of leases 24 months long the average lease should be 12 months in right now (given steady state). I.e half of them expire in a year. Lets say that they realised this summer that things will be different then the effect should gradually start to show almost immediately.

I think that was GP’s point. We have a few one-year leases on small spaces, but most of ours are 5 year leases, usually with renewal options, sometimes with break options (for $$) at 3 years.

Or anything that‘s a multiple of 12. If the lease was signed in Q2 of any year, it will be up for renewal in Q2.

Around here commercial leases on office buildings are typically seven years.

the scope of the pandemic wasn't yet clear in Q1

But the decision to terminate happens when the lease expires at any point after the pandemic happened, not exactly as the pandemic started. If you signed a 1-year lease in 2019Q3 and then realized that you're going to permanent WFH in 2020Q2, you let the lease expire in 2020Q3 and count yourself lucky. So the impact of this should be spread across the year following lockdowns/wfh, not all concentrated in 2021Q2.

Shouldn't we already be seeing this from leases that were signed in Q3 2019?

Yes, and we are seeing it, but there are many leases continuing until Q2 2021 (and beyond). The past few months have seen a slow and gradual decline, but a fair number of leases are still being paid and are locked in. Q2 2021 is when that decline accelerates and drops off a cliff.

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