The Monthly Beat - December '24 Edition
A recap of the most interesting Pittsburgh tech news from the past few weeks and upcoming local tech events.
Good morning!
Hope you’re having a great holiday season so far. Things are slowing down a bit around the Burgh (as they should), but still a few good stories to highlight.
Let’s get into it!
What Happened this Past Month
The Big Story
Pittsburgh Office Space Shrank Significantly in 2024
Given it’s the last month of the year, I figured I’d do a “looking back” style big story this time around. What sent me down this particular track was a November announcement that ed-tech company Niche is getting a new office, and yes, it is that one that has had a “Luxury Office Space” sign hanging on it next to Veteran’s Bridge since the pandemic. It’s an interesting move for the purportedly “fully remote” ed-tech company, with only a very small percentage of its employees still residing in Pittsburgh. The building in question is called “The Vision,” a very corporate mumbo jumbo-sounding name that would hope to indicate some level of foresight by whoever built it.
Well, no one involved had the foresight for something like COVID happening. Even with Niche and two other non-tech companies sharing the space, the building will still only be 31% occupied, illustrating the difficulties of filling offices in the post-pandemic era of remote work. This got me looking for some Q3 office real estate stats, which I found through CBRE:
For those unfamiliar with the terminology, vacancy rate is the percentage of office space available, and availability rate is the percentage space available for buying/selling/leasing within the short term. Finally, asking rate is just how much money on average people are asking for offices.
While the vacancy rate for offices is higher than it’s ever been, it’s still not that much higher than at the start of 2020. Meanwhile, the availability rate is still far above it, though slowly dropping towards it in 2024, and the asking rate has jumped up from Q2 to Q3 this year. This was super confusing to me at first. Given these stats suggest the market is normalizing, why does the city still feel emptier during the work week than it did pre-pandemic?
The answer is two-fold. Firstly, Niche’s new office is 7,400 sq. ft. smaller than its previous office, which is part of a larger trend of Pittsburgh companies downsizing their physical offices. Secondly, I’ll just paste this quote from CBRE:
“Inventory shrunk as the First and Market Building, as well as Gulf Tower, were removed from the statistical set; the properties are ready for conversion to mixed-use and residential, respectively.” (emphasis added)
Two massive office buildings are no longer going to be offices and were removed from these stats! Therefore, the numbers look better than they actually are. So I don’t think it’s a stretch to say, in 2024, remote work has cemented its mark on Pittsburgh’s offices.
The Headlines
On the hardware side of things, Governor Shapiro announced a $1 million investment in a semiconductor manufacturer in the Greater Pittsburgh Area, Powerex. The company specializes in air and vacuum control devices and will in turn be investing the state’s money into its facility and staff in Youngwood, PA.
Pittsburgh Robotics Discovery Day was held at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. Plenty of cool new technologies from local companies were on display that day! Check out this piece by NEXTPittsburgh for the highlights.
Also in robotics, technical.ly published a great story on how Zelienople-based manufacturer Penna Flame is leveraging locally designed robotics to improve their processes.
In the “things that no one asked for” category, PittGPT is now a thing.
Duolingo posted an overview of their server-driven UI architecture. Always interesting to peek behind the curtain, but TL;DR: “the API is essentially a UI library with versioning.”
As we settle into another Pittsburgh winter, I think it’s good to reflect on ways to improve and maintain mental health through the colder months. To that end, local web guru Brad Frost published a solid post on his mental health journey that I think is worth a read, especially if you’ve ever struggled with ADHD.
Lastly, I was nominated for the Technical.ly’s Creator of the Year Award. I lost, but just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone out there who voted for me!
For the Days Ahead
Remote workers: have a tip or two you’d like to share on how to thrive during the winter months in Pittsburgh? If you haven’t already, subscribe below to receive exclusive access to the best chat room in the Pittsburgh tech scene later this month! I’ll be asking for submissions from readers to include upcoming posts.
Do you have an upcoming event that you’d like me to share here next month? Just let me know!
As always, I’m looking for guest writers and podcast interviews! Do you have a local Pittsburgh tech topic you’d like to wax poetic about? Hit me up! Spoiler alert: It’s not a paid gig, but I would be more than willing to host or repost your piece if you want to publish it somewhere else as well.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
—Austin