About 15 days ago, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that the California economy will reopen fully on 6-15-2021. The mask mandate for the state will continue. At this point, there is not a date that the statewide mask mandate will be lifted. California will lift most covid-19 restrictions by June 15, 2021. The economy of California is the largest in the United States, boasting a $3.2 trillion gross state product as of 2019. California would rank as the world's fifth largest economy, if it were a sovereign nation. In commercial real estate news, the high-tech region of Silicon Valley has reached its highest office vacancy rate since 2014. Office vacancies in Silicon Valley have increased for six straight quarters. Office vacancies hit double digit levels in Palo Alto and Santa Clara. Palo Alto is home to Stanford University, HP (Hewlett Packard), VMware, etc. Santa Clara is home to Intel, Applied Materials, Nvidia, ServiceNow, etc. There are many other IT companies located in Santa Clara, and Palo Alto. In April 2021, Google is allowing a small amount of US employees to return to the office voluntarily. All Google employees aren't required to return to the office, until at least September 2021. Salesforce will reopen its Salesforce tower in May 2021, while employees can continue to work from home through 2021. Salesforce Tower is located in San Francisco, and it is 61 stories high. Salesforce is projecting a small group of fully vaccinated employees can volunteer to work, in the Salesforce Tower. Salesforce Tower has over 1.4 million square feet of office space. Furthermore, Salesforce has reopened 22 offices across the country. The company said it will reopen Palo Alto and Irvine, California offices in April through June timeframe. The company has also been busy remodeling its offices, by adding Plexiglas; air purifiers; and handles that people can use without touching. In contrast, Atlassian and Zillow are two companies that have given the option to its employees to work from home permanently. Salesforce and Google want their employees to return to an office once to three times a week. This model is essentially a hybrid model, to fit the needs of most employees. In addition, Facebook says it is bringing back about 10% of its workers to its Menlo Park headquarters. The #1 social network is doing this massive step on May 10. Facebook's Fremont offices would reopen May 17. Its Sunnyvale offices would reopen on May 24. The company's downtown San Francisco offices plan on reopening on June 7, with similar capacity limits. With 17,000 employees, Facebook was Menlo Park’s largest employer in 2020. In closing, Apple and other companies are implementing a "hybrid environment" to return to in-person work. Apple is wanting some of its employees to return to the office, in June 2021. The companies are coming back to the office in phases. This process is including a phase 1, and a phase 2 approach. Companies return to office will be a huge shot in the arm, and continued good news for the US economy.
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