Mark Ritchie

President, Ritchie Commercial

Commercial Real Estate and Development Columnist

Mark has spent his entire career in commercial real estate including in the 1980s working for Lincoln Property Company building and leasing four Downtown San Francisco high rise office buildings. He teamed up with his late father in 1987 and came to San Jose to rebuild that office. Ritchie Commercial currently has offices in San Jose, San Francisco, Walnut Creek and Santa Cruz and is active throughout Northern California in full service commercial real estate brokerage and property management.

Mark has been awarded Office Broker of the Year, Hall of Fame and Mike Murphy (For Community Service) Awards by the Association of Silicon Valley Brokers, ASVB. He has chaired the boards of the ASVB multiple times, as well as San Jose Museum of Art and History San Jose. Mark is a senior fellow of American Leadership Forum Silicon Valley.

Mark also served as Honorary Consul for Uruguay in San Francisco for 25 years. He graduated in 1979 Phi Beta Kappa from UC Berkeley in Economics and Political Science with a minor in Practice of Fine Art.

He is a passionate surfer and skier, and a single father of two girls.

Columns

June 12, 2024June 12, 2024by Mark Ritchie

Ritchie: We will need office buildings again

As we crawl through the recovery in our Bay Area urban cores post-pandemic with an enduring work from home revolution, it seems like we may never see another high-rise downtown office building construction wave again. Record shattering vacancy rates and value plunges abound, the media has now made it a “who is worst” competition between...

Columns

May 8, 2024May 8, 2024by Mark Ritchie

Ritchie: The personality of ownership

As we see the first distressed office building sale transactions of what is romantically called The Great Reset — also known as the greatest single asset class value extinction event in commercial real estate history — a few observations about the leasing of these battered towers come to mind. Selling for pennies on the dollar...

Columns

A real estate sign for an industrial property in San Jose

April 10, 2024April 10, 2024by Mark Ritchie

Ritchie: A treatise on real estate commissions

We lifers in the commercial real estate brokerage world have often looked upon our distant cousins in the residential world in a somewhat bemused fashion. No disrespect intended, my late great mother was a major pioneer in the San Francisco mansion selling business, where until the 1970s it was literally called “bedroom brokerage” in that...

More news