Meta Aims to Shed 2M SF of Empty Bay Area Office Space
Meta is moving to offload up to 2M SF of empty Bay Area office space, the company has disclosed in an SEC filing.
The social media giant, which owns and leases about 11M SF in the Bay Area, including its Menlo Park headquarters, said in its Jan. 30 filing it plans “to either sublease, early terminate, or abandon” 2M SF of the space that is unoccupied.
Meta characterized the downsizing of its Bay Area footprint as a “facilities consolidation restructuring.”
Meta has tapped JLL to offer for sublease a three-building office campus encompassing more than 530K SF in Burlingame. In 2021, the firm inked a long-term deal for the campus, known as Peninsula Innovation Point, but never occupied it, CoStar reported. The lease for the complex, located at 555-557 Airport Boulevard, expires in 2039.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced last month that the company is laying off 5% of its workforce, with a focus on “underperforming” workers. The platform also is relocating its content reviewers and policy writers from California to Texas as part of a plan to end its fact-checking program.
Despite Meta’s ongoing footprint consolidation, the office market in Silicon Valley appears to be on a trajectory for a robust recovery in 2025.
Led by a bevy of big-ticket tech deals, office leasing volume in Silicon Valley soared to 2.4M SF in Q4 2024, the first time the quarterly tally has topped 2M SF since Q2 2019. A leasing surge of more than 4M SF in the second half of 2024 pushed the full-year deal volume to over 5.5M SF in Silicon Valley, Savills reported.
In December, cloud-based data platform Snowflake announced that it would sublease a 773K SF campus in Menlo Park from Meta, the largest office lease in the Bay Area region in nearly 15 years. The rapidly expanding AI data player will take over a four-building campus at 125-135 Constitution Drive and 100-150 Independence Drive, part of the Menlo Gateway project owned by Bohannon Cos.
Meta’s overall Bay Area portfolio actually expanded in 2024 by 1M SF due to existing agreements that went into effect and developments that delivered last year, the San Francisco Business Times reported.
Meta first signaled plans to shrink its real estate footprint in 2022 at a time when it had nearly 2.4M SF in its California development pipeline, including the massive Willow Village complex near its Menlo Park HQ as well as more than 700K SF in Burlingame.
Meta leases the 756K SF Park Tower at 250 Howard Street in downtown San Francisco. In addition to its Menlo Park and Burlingame facilities, the social media giant owns and leases several properties in Fremont, Newark, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale.
Source: GlobeSt/ALM