Not only has the Internet revolution required all of us to learn new concepts, words, phrases and ways of doing things, it has made some terms and concepts in commercial real estate obsolete.

Whatever you call it — the “Internet industry,” “e-commerce,” or “dotcom” businesses, — the phenomenon has become a change agent in our society unlike anything since the invention of the printing press more than a half a millennium ago. Even so, it’s taken nearly five centuries for the printing press to even begin to affect the world the way the Internet has in just the last five years.

According to a recent National Real Estate Investor article, e-commerce has mushroomed since 1995 into an estimated $180 billion in sales this year alone, and is well on its way to a recording a staggering $1.2 trillion volume in 2002. The use of the Web is doubling every 100 days, with an estimated 200 million users expected to be online by this time next year.

What does all this mean to San Diego? Plenty. The Wall Street Journal recently identified San Diego as one of the leading Internet communities in the nation — an observation that surprises no one even vaguely familiar with our town’s business landscape. It therefore shouldn’t surprise anybody that the phenomenal growth of the Web has begun to influence the local office real estate market.

Law and accounting practices and other service firms are building or leasing new office facilities to be near their high-tech and e-commerce clients in the “Silicon Beach” areas of La Jolla Village, Del Mar, and Sorrento Valley and Mesa. The dotcoms themselves also are on the move as few tenant types have ever been. What were garage-based businesses two years ago today are taking major spaces in Sorrento Valley and elsewhere.

Much of the office space being leased by these cutting-edge enterprises is in older buildings long considered “functionally obsolete” by more conventional and nontechnology users

Therein lies the “takeaway premise” of this column: The newest and most advanced technology-based businesses are finding homes in some of San Diego’s oldest Class B and C buildings. The irony is that these buildings had been shunned as obsolete by more conventional office tenants whose businesses and lines of work are far from being cutting edge.

The heightened demand for space in these 20- to 30-year-old buildings has rendered the “obsolete” descriptor, well … obsolete.

One example of this is a relocation our firm is presently handling. Collegeclub.com, billed as “the world’s largest college community,” is relocating from Mission Valley to downtown’s Executive Complex Annex, taking 40,000 vacant square feet once occupied by a billiards and athletic club. By any conventional standard, this Annex space with 16-foot ceilings, industrial-size kitchen and rooftop patio would be considered functionally and even socially obsolete. Not so as far as this dotcom was concerned.

The appeal of these older buildings is their location and flexibility. Dotcom companies, like other high-tech organizations, typically are owned and staffed by people who want to experience the excitement and bustle of working downtown and in other urban locales. As it so happens, much of the available office space in these areas is in Class B and C buildings. If the older, less desirable buildings in these locations are the only structures that can accommodate their space needs and provide a higher level of service more cost effectively, then so be it. To quote Michael W. Brennan of Chicago’s First Industrial Realty Trust: “E-commerce is changing real estate’s maxim from ‘location, location, location’ to ‘location, price, service.'”

There is some risk in a strong dependence on the e-commerce industry or any single economic segment. Like any industry or business endeavor, dotcoms are vulnerable to getting a sudden cold shoulder from Wall Street. If a sharp decline in market confidence requires high-tech tenants to fold their tents and abandon their space leases, it would create tremendous upheaval and distress in this city’s industrial and office real-estate sectors, as well as well beyond the real-estate business. It’s not difficult to foresee the impact that upheaval would have on almost every area of our local economy.

I, for one, don’t see a sudden decline in the e-commerce/dotcom/Internet industry in the foreseeable or even long-range future. Technology has dealt San Diego a strong hand in making the city and region an e-commerce capital. San Diego has everything it takes to maintain and even grow that special distinction — weather, lifestyle and, as it turns out, an ample supply of functionally “obsolete” office space.