Salesforce unit Tableau to exit former headquarters in Seattle

Tableau will give up its former headquarters in north Seattle, abandoning more than 110,000 square feet of offices by Lake Union.

The data analytics software firm owned by San Francisco-based Salesforce will not renew its lease at the Fremont Lake Union Center at 837 North 34th Street, in Fremont, the Seattle Times reported. The lease expires at the end of this month.

Salesforce, a cloud-based sales software company, bought Tableau in 2019 for $15.7 billion. Ryan Aytay, CEO for Tableau, is based in San Francisco.

More than a year ago, the firm said that it would get rid of Tableau-occupied offices as it met a broad tech industry slump by laying off thousands of workers. 

Despite a plan to shed more than 450,000 square feet of office leases around Seattle, Salesforce will retain a beachhead in the Puget Sound market, according to the Times.

The firm will keep its offices at 929 Tower in Bellevue, which it considers a second hub outside San Francisco, according to the Times. Tableau workers will stay tied to local Salesforce offices.

“Tableau is a critical and thriving part of our business and we remain fully committed to our Seattle-based home and employees,” an unidentified Salesforce spokesperson told the Times in an email. “Employees have access to a vibrant office environment at our Data1, Plaza and Bellevue offices where they can connect with colleagues and customers in the area.”

The Plaza office includes a small location in Fremont that Salesforce renewed this year.

Salesforce’s decision to exit Tableau’s former headquarters at the 112,500-square-foot building came up in an earnings call this month by landlord Kilroy Realty, based in Los Angeles. The three-building campus contains 423,800 square feet.

“As a reminder, we continue to anticipate three large move-outs totaling 350,000 square feet in the back half of the year,” Elliott Trencher, chief financial officer for Kilroy, told analysts on the call. “Salesforce in Seattle will leave in the third quarter and Capital One and Microsoft in the Bay Area are expected to move out in the fourth quarter.”

Trencher said interest has picked up for the Fremont building and that Kilroy expects to lease it before long. Several unidentified real estate insiders believe Nvidia, a computer chip powerhouse based in Silicon Valley, will take at least a floor in the building. 

A Fremont lease could help a softening Seattle office submarket from getting worse, according to the Times.

Office vacancy in the South Lake Union submarket, which includes Fremont, has climbed by more than 2 percent since last year to 12.1 percent, according to Colliers. Two years ago, the measure of empty offices was less than 5 percent.

— Dana Bartholomew

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