Fintech Firm to Lease San Francisco Space Vacated by Pinterest

Almost a year after it listed its 150K SF building in San Francisco’s SoMa district as available for sublease, Pinterest is finalizing a deal with a Dutch fintech player to occupy the office space.

Adyen, a digital payments startup based in Amsterdam, is in talks to lease the six-story building at 505 Brannan Street, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The term of the sublease runs through May 2033, the report said.

The Dutch firm’s San Francisco footprint currently consists of about 42K SF at 274 Brannan Street, about a half-mile from the Brannan Street offices vacated by last year by Pinterest.

Adyen’s lease at 274 Brannan expires in January 2026. The expanding startup, a competitor of payment processing firm Stripe, has more than two dozen offices globally.

Pinterest downsized in a restructuring last year that also saw the San Francisco-based social media platform lay off about 4% of its workforce.

Pinterest pre-leased the building at 505 Brannan in 2015 a year before it was delivered by the developers, a joint venture of Alexandria Real Estate and TMG Partners.

The social media platform was rapidly expanding in the South of Market neighborhood at the time, occupying four separate office locations in the same half-mile stretch.

When the pandemic hit, Pinterest became one of the first major San Francisco tech firms to cancel a large lease commitment, paying $90M to terminate a 490K SF pre-lease at a 1M SF project at 88 Bluxome.

In 2022, when Pinterest announced that it was adopting a hybrid work model the company called “PinFlex” that permitted its employees to “choose where they work best,” the tech company vacated a SoMa building at 410 Townsend, where the lease on two floors it was occupy was expiring, the Chronicle reported.

Early last year, when it announced the 4% workforce reduction, Pinterest said it would close another SoMa office at 149 Bluxome St. The company’s global footprint now is about 500K SF, which the company deemed at the end of 2023 “sufficient for our existing needs,” the report said.

San Francisco’s office market saw its vacancy rate hit nearly 36% in Q4 2023. Office building owners are anticipating a recovery later this year fueled by the boom in generative AI.