Working behind the scenes on the front lines of the Silicon Valley tech boom, the Riviera team is quite familiar with the multi-faceted challenges that startups face during their initial growth stages. It is difficult enough to find the right talent for your startup – but finding the right office space for your team can be just as daunting. So when Justin Bedecarre from Cushman & Wakefield decided to examine the dynamics of the Silicon Valley real estate marketplace, we were very excited to contribute our own engineering placement data to help paint a better picture of a few of the different factors affecting today’s startups.
(GigaOm) – To say that Silicon Valley real estate market is hot would be an understatement. And no, Facebook millionaires buying mega-mansions has nothing to do with it. Instead it is start-ups who are helping push the rents to stratospheric heights in parts of Silicon Valley. It is hard to go to a San Francisco party and not meet a founder grumbling about being unable to find real-estate to house her growing number of troops.
Times are particularly hard for smaller companies — ones that have not raised mega-rounds of fundings. Things are going to get even harder for many of them. And they would have guys like Pinterest and Palantir to thank for the real estate inflation.
Even though Facebook has moved out of Palo Alto, founder friends tell me that things have not changed much. Palantir, the shadowy and fast growing company, has been gobbling up real estate space. It is rumored to have taken hold of the vast building that was previously occupied by Borders. The real-estate market in Palo Alto is so tight that even a liberally funded company like Pinterest is having to look elsewhere.