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Facebook opens mega Menlo Park office amid major expansion

The social media giant continues to gobble up real estate despite what has been a difficult summer

Mark Zuckerberg and a model of the project (Credit: Level10GC)
Mark Zuckerberg and a model of the project (Credit: Level10GC)

Facebook recorded the biggest one-day drop in its stock value in July, but it has not slowed down its real estate purchases.

The social media giant opened its new 525,200-square-foot office in Menlo Park last week and has big plans to further expand in the Bay Area, according to Bloomberg.

Those plans include leasing over 1 million square feet in San Francisco, including the entirety of John Buck Company’s 43-story Park Tower at Transbay.

It also intends to move into 1.1 million square feet of office space in Sunnyvale and 1.2 million square feet at more than a dozen office buildings in the East Bay area. Its new Menlo Park headquarters, MPK 21, is more than 100,000 square feet larger than its existing office next door.

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On July 26, Facebook’s stock lost $120 billion in market capitalization after the company said it would miss earnings estimates, and that user growth had slowed down.

Mark Zuckerberg’s now 14-year-old company is plenty busy in Los Angeles, too. As of May, Facebook was nearing an agreement to lease 260,000 square feet at Tishman Speyer’s Brickyard office campus in Playa Vista. That’s more than twice what Facebook planned to lease there in March.

Facebook’s expansion in Menlo Park, once a small industrial neighborhood, will be more cause for headaches among locals who have fiercely criticized the company for driving up prices in the local rental market.

Last summer, the company announced it would develop 1,500 residential units in a 59-acre community. Of those, 225 units will be rented at below-market rates. [Bloomberg] — Dennis Lynch 

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