Big Tech has slashed its space in half

Uber followed Mark Zuckerberg’s lead and put a portion of its massive Mission Bay headquarters campus up for grabs months later, with two buildings eventually snapped up by OpenAI last October. 

The city’s largest private employer, Salesforce, said in a recent securities filing that it now owns or leases less than 45% of office space it had from the year prior—about 900,000 square feet, down from 1.6 million, as of last January. “Our offices remain a critical part of our culture here in San Francisco, our global headquarters, and around the world,” a Salesforce spokesperson said in a statement. 

Data from Avison Young shows that, among the top 20 tech companies in San Francisco based on office space in 2019, at least four have completely eliminated their office footprint, with one company reducing its space by over 730,000 square feet. Another company, which still has offices in the city, reduced its space by more than 1 million square feet. Overall, 80% of these companies have decreased the amount of office space they use in the city.

Before the pandemic, Big Tech occupied the best spaces while paying top-tier rents, real estate experts said. Derek Daniels, regional research director for Colliers, said the combination of low interest rates and the explosion of cloud computing, social media and other technologies drove the previous boom. 

“With expectations of continued growth in funding and headcount, some were even committing to proposed [but unbuilt] sites,” Daniels said.