Uber Lists 287K SF of San Francisco HQ Campus for Sublease

Uber has listed for sublease an entire 287K SF building it never occupied at its four-building, 1M SF global headquarters in San Francisco’s Mission Bay district.

Uber has been paying $84 per SF for its headquarters complex since it opened in 2019. The ride-sharing firm also invested $160M to build-out the office space at the complex after it was developed for Uber by Alexandria Real Estate Equities, CoStar reported.

Uber employees have been working under a hybrid work schedule since Q3 2022.

Nearly a third of the offices in San Francisco are empty, a vacancy rate that approached 30% in Q1 2023, according to CBRE’s market report. Empty offices now encompass 27M SF in the city, eight times the amount in 2019, when vacancy was 5%.

Available space has risen above 34%, including the growing amount of offices listed for sublease that are not yet vacant. The amount of office space on the market for sublease is approaching 10M SF. More than 900K SF was listed in Q1 2023, including substantial listings from Pinterest, Meta and Slack.

Last month, Salesforce announced that it would be vacating the remaining space in one of two of its namesake headquarters tower in San Francisco.

Salesforce said it would sublease the last 104K SF of space it was occupying in the 30-story tower known as Salesforce East, located at 350 Mission Street, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

The tech firm has leased the entire 455K SF building from Kilroy Realty for more than a decade. Salesforce began reducing its footprint in its HQ towers last summer, when it announced listing for subleasing about 412K SF of the 817K SF, 43-story Salesforce West tower on Fremont St., according to a report in the San Francisco Business Times.

Salesforce said it will maintain ownership of the building and may reoccupy the space in the future, a Salesforce spokesperson said, in a statement. About 352K SF of the sublease listing was made available in August, the rest was vacated in December.

“We are subleasing floors in Salesforce West to make the most efficient use of our real estate footprint. As the largest private employer in San Francisco, we are deeply committed to the city and are actively welcoming employees back to Salesforce Tower,” the company’s statement said.

Salesforce has embraced a workplace strategy it calls “Success from Anywhere, Careers Everywhere,” giving employees a say in how much work they do in the office and making hybrid/remote work a permanent part of the corporate culture. The company said it wants to “empower great (work) experiences for everyone whether they are in the office or in remote locations.”

In February, Slack, which is owned by Salesforce, put all of its headquarters in San Francisco—about 200K SF — on the sublease market.