Check out the latest news about LA’s burgeoning Silicon Beach Area:
USA Today: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-07-15/silicon-beach/56241864/1
LA Times: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/11/business/la-fi-cover-la-tech-20111211
Jason Nazar’s blog: http://www.jasonnazar.com/2008/11/23/a-tale-of-two-tech-cities-%E2%80%93-silicon-valley-vs-los-angeles/
Here is my next car. I have a Smart Car now. This is the next generation–a folding car. It probably won’t fly in the US.
After offering their services to drivers in Washington D.C. and Baltimore, Parking Panda has gone live in the Bay Area. Here is another disruptive San Francisco based technology that enables garage owners and homeowners to rent out their unused parking spaces (think of homeowners with empty driveways during the day), and in turn, allows drivers to find those spaces and submit rental requests. TechCrunch outlines the exciting details for commuters in their article published today.
Image courtesy of TechCrunch
The Parking Panda application allows users to view available parking spaces based on their current driving location. Parking Panda has only gone live in three cities for full functionality for parking spot listings and rental requests. In 25 other cities, Parking Panda offers a parking finder function for drivers. Parking Panda has plans to go live in Boston, Philadelphia, Austin, and another west coast city within the next few months.
Parking Panda’s website and application has an easily accessible interface that allows users to either “Find Parking,” “List a Space,” and a link that explains “How it Works.”
Scarce parking in Los Angeles has long been an issue, especially on the Westside. Numerous tech, media and digital tenants are searching for ways to find more parking spots for their employees on a daily basis. In August, we published a blog, “The Coming Collision of Office Densification and Parking in Los Angeles,” where we described the parking conundrum that most of the Los Angeles workforce has to deal with. Parking Panda may help alleviate apart of this dilemma, and we hope to see this promising company expand to Southern California in the near future.
The latest article from TechCrunch introduced RidePal, a company that recently received $500K from 500 startups. RidePal is part of the collaborative consumption movement that originates out of social networking in the Bay Area. Referred to as a “Google Shuttle for the rest of us,” RidePal is an innovative idea that should also be brought to Los Angeles. It has the potential to alleviate the parking conundrum and terrible commutes that plague Los Angelenos. The service allows companies, employers, and building owners to share the cost of shuttle services to transport employees to and from work.
Image courtesy of RidePal’s website
RidePal is a system that offers shared commuting buses equipped with Wi-Fi as well as a ticketing, reservation, and management platform. It currently uses a total of 15 routes that link San Francisco with the east bay, south bay, and peninsula. RidePal partners with several bus companies and builds new routes based on the demands and needs of companies and their employees. The shuttle program has been especially attractive for growing companies that are looking to expand their workforce because it is easier to retain and recruit employees from outside the area.
Not only is RidePal an eco-friendly method of transportation, but it also benefits both companies and employees. Businesses that choose to bring this service to their employees don’t need to pay for the entire bus, but only pay for the capacity they need, which allows them to save costs. For employees, RidePal offers the opportunity to spend their normal commuting hours surfing the Web, completing work, or just enjoying newly freed up time that was spent driving before.
If RidePal was brought to Los Angeles, Culver City, for example, could finally put to use their underutilized city and privately owned parking lots. The shuttle bus would provide transportation at these parking lots as well as to the Expo stations. It would only take one major employer without sufficient on-site parking and the Expo to begin this service to offsite parking lots and the Expo. The cost could be shared with other employers who want to also use a shuttle service for this purpose.
After San Francisco, RidePal aims to eventually bring their service to other top urban clusters. Hopefully the program’s success in Northern California will influence companies in Los Angeles to take a second look into similar ride-sharing programs for their employees.
One of PMI’s partners, Jeffrey Palmer, was featured in the latest edition of the Los Angeles Business Journal. Click the link below to read the article in its entirety.
LABJ Article From Who’s Who In Real Estate Aug 27-Sept 2 2012
New York has recaptured most of the jobs lost there during the recession. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has done a great job at attracting technology tenants to the Big Apple. For example, Google has a million square foot facility in the Chelsea area of New York. That space trumps its 100,000 square foot facility in the Venice area of Los Angeles. The music sharing service Spotify, and Livestream, the market leader for live event coverage, are also located in New York. There is a website, called Made in NY Digital Map, that points out digital and tech tenants located throughout the city.
Not only is New York attracting tech and digital tenants, but they are also starting to court a substantial piece of L.A.’s film post-production business with a recent tax credit. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently enacted this law, which increases the previous 10% credit to a whopping 30% on post-production costs. If a company wants to earn a slightly larger credit, they can venture to upstate New York and get a 35% credit. New York is aggressively going after L.A.’s post production business, which has a heavy concentration on the Westside of Los Angeles. This is the first type of post-production credit the industry has seen. Time will tell if companies will move to the East Coast to take advantage of it.
New York has been having an astounding year in TV production, mainly because of its film tax credit program. They are setting aside more than $400 million a year in order to attract film and TV productions. Compared to the $100 million that California spends, one has to wonder why they aren’t putting up much of a fight against New York.
The Los Angeles Times goes more in-depth about this subject in their recent article.
Office tenants, especially in digital technology, continue to fit more people into the same amount of space. Open floor plans and higher ceilings support this greater density. In Los Angeles, workers drive to work and parking is limited. The normal office building has three parking spaces per 1,000 square feet of office space. All the while, office density is growing to five users per 1,000 square feet and greater. Companies want to supply parking for their employees. They don’t want to force their employees to carpool, have to take transit, walk more than very short distances to park, or have to ride a shuttle. This reality is hard on planners. It will be a good idea to begin to introduce the Los Angeles creative work force to these alternative methods. The reality is that brokers and tenants are requesting additional onsite parking more frequently. Densities are continuing to go up and building owners, brokers, and companies need to deal with issue.
Los Angeles is finally gaining some success in finding a way to apply its creative talents in media and entertainment to the web. As a result, a new emerging industry is forming that combines artist’s talents with digital tech expertise. These companies produce original video content for the web. Below are some stories on couple of these firms.
When PMI first started looking to purchase office buildings in 2003 in San Francisco, a couple of brokers tried to sell us buildings in San Francisco’s Mid-Market areas. They said it was going to make a comeback. Most others said that they had heard that for years. The area had a large population of homeless people, homeless shelters, and single room occupancy housings. We were told by all the cognoscenti to stay away.
In 2010, San Francisco boomed with tech tenants. Super star tenants found it difficult to find very large blocks of space in prime areas like SoMa. One of our tenants, Twitter, started in 6,000 square feet. They were a runaway success and started shopping for 150,000 square feet with expansion options for another 150,000 square feet. Twitter threatened to move out of San Francisco because of a city payroll tax that would tax stock options upon their exercise. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee set up Mid Market as a payroll tax-free zone. Real Estate magnate Shorenstien Properties then purchased a million square foot clunker of a building in Mid Market, planned a creative office renovation, and made Twitter a deal they could not refuse.
Another one of our tenants, Zendesk, moved to Mid Market because we were out of space in our SoMa building. Zendesk got a great deal and achieved their rent objectives. Yammer, who is also our tenant, moved into the same building that Twitter did after Kilroy wanted too large a letter of credit as security (Yammer was recently purchased by Microsoft–who knew).
So why is it that Mid-Market succeeded this time? Primarily it is because Twitter became a magnet that attracted other tech tenants. Mayor Lee and Shorenstien Properties offered Twitter such a fantastic deal they would have been crazy not to accept it. This was done during a market where creative space was running low because tech business was booming.
In the New Geography of Jobs, Berkeley professor of economics Enrico Moretti comments that super star companies attract other super stars and even “wanna-be” companies like a magnet. Indeed, he attributes the success of Seattle in tech to the fact that Bill Gates decided to relocate there to scale Microsoft. In San Francisco, Twitter was the super star and it attracted other companies, like Yammer, among others. The payroll tax-free zone and a landlord willing to give a cost leader to attract a super star helped.
Here is an article from Reuben and Junius expanding more on the rebirth of Mid-Market.
PARKING
CONVERT WAREHOUSES TO CREATIVE SPACE
FIBER OPTICS
For Culver City–work on parking, parking, parking and make it easy for developers to convert the warehouses to creative office (which means helping figuring out the parking). Culver City has a good inventory of mid century warehouses buildings which developers have converted into amazing creative space. Samitaur has supplied ground breaking architecture. That has been one of Culver City’s magnets.
By Jacquelyn RyanMonday, July 30, 2012
Move over, Silicon Beach: El Segundo wants in on the tech boom action.
The Urban Land Institute just completed a study for the city that suggests ways it can develop its own creative office space hub that would compete with Santa Monica and Venice, where Google Inc. occupies more than 100,000 square feet and is looking for more space.
The focus of the plan is the former industrial neighborhood known as Smoky Hollow, bounded by the Chevron oil refinery, Pacific Coast Highway and El Segundo’s downtown corridor.
Urban Land Institute consultants conducted the study to help the city identify amenities and services it needs to provide to attract creative firms and become an incubator area for startups. The study, released last week, found that the neighborhood’s industrial feel, small midcentury buildings and beachside locale will be attractive to such firms. Building prices are also advantageous, coming in at least $325 a square foot cheaper than Santa Monica.
But to be truly competitive, the city needs to increase its fiberoptic connections, add parking and amend its specific plan to encourage adaptive reuse, because creative companies seem to be attracted to a concrete-floor, bare-ceiling aesthetic.
PMI Properties 