People are finally starting to return to San Francisco offices

Downtown San Francisco’s corporate offices have struggled in comparison with other major American cities, contributing to broader anxieties over the so-called downtown “doom loop.” 

A new report from Bay Area corporate real estate AI startup Placer.ai found, however, that San Francisco has bounced back in a key way — seeing the largest year-over-year increase in office visits of any American city. 

San Francisco saw more than a 38% increase in office visits in July 2023 compared with July 2022. Compared with Los Angeles, which saw only a 12% increase year over year, or Miami, which saw a paltry 3% year-over-year increase, that number is a good indication that people are starting to head back into their offices downtown.

San Francisco also saw increased demand in office space, according to a report last month by commercial real estate group VTS. Taken together, it’s a promising start for San Francisco’s corporate downtown.

In recent months, tech CEOs have ratcheted up their campaigns to draw people back into the office. Two prominent Silicon Valley CEOs — Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Benioff — cast aspersions on remote worker productivity in the past year. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, meanwhile, is moving workers to a two-day model to employees’ apparent chagrin. Alphabet and Apple are both tracking employee badges. And come September, Meta and investment titan BlackRock (which has San Francisco offices) will require workers to go into the office more often — likely setting the trend for even more smaller companies to do the same.

But there’s still a way to go before these indicators result in a significant recovery. San Francisco’s vacancy rate as of the second quarter of 2023 was at nearly 32%, a record high that shows no signs of slowing down. Real estate firms are selling their holdings at major losses. And San Francisco, according to Placer.ai’s statistics, still has the most drastic decline in in-office workers compared with before the pandemic — with a 55.8% decline in visits to office buildings in 2023 compared with 2019, the highest of all the major American cities it lists.