At Rofo we track the number of searches performed on the site.  These graphs represent the number of searches made per month by Rofo users for 126 cities in the 5 major Bay Area regions, East Bay, South Bay, Peninsula, San Francisco and North Bay.  Commercial space search volume helps give an insight into small-business health and formation in the Bay Area.  The majority of these searches are for spaces under 5000 sf and includes office, R&D, industrial, warehouse and retail space searches.

The East Bay is a largest region and receives the most searches on Rofo.  The cities range from Oakland, west to Antioch and south to Fremont and everything in between.  The south bay comes in second in search volume and includes cities like San Jose, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale.  The Peninsula, San Franciso and North Bay regions all have similar search volumes that average around 5000 and under per month.

The first general trend is a slight spike in volume for all regions in March 2009.  It seems that the pent up demand accrued during the worst parts of the financial crisis in the latter parts of 2008 and early 2009.  In March 2009, when businesses realized that the financial system was not going to implode they began to search for space again, leading to a slightly higher search volume.  However after the March spike search volumes declined in each region until August.  Search volumes have remained fairly stable through 2009, but definitely have not increased.

Obviously any kind economic recovery, which depends heavily on the ability for small businesses to grow and establish themselves, hasn’t quite taken root yet, or at least isn’t reflected in Rofo’s search data.  If a recovery does begin, it would be reasonable to see an increase in businesses searching for space, either to expand or start up.  Unfortunately we haven’t seen evidence of that quite yet.