Elon Musk’s X Corporation found the first tenant to fill its former San Francisco office space.
Tech company Motive inked a deal to sublease 40,000 square feet at X’s vacant 1355 Market Street offices, the San Francisco Business Times reported. The San Francisco-based company, which makes artificial intelligence-enabled vehicle operations and automation management software, is the first to grab a piece of the 460,000-square-foot sublease offering.
Motive, formerly KeepTruckin, is expected to move into the X space in phases, starting with a 25,000 square feet. The 750,000-square-foot building in Mid-Market became a well-known hub of activity in the past decade after Twitter, now X, moved its headquarters there in 2012.
The lease expires at the end of April 2029, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
“The city’s energy, innovation and talent” inspired the firm to invest in the headquarters lease, to “make work safer, more productive, and more profitable,” said Shu White, chief legal officer at Motive.
The Mid-Market area, or Lower Hayes as some are trying to rebrand the neighborhood, has one of the highest office vacancy rates in the city but has seen increased interest from startups, said Mike Sample of JLL, who represented X in the deal.
“It’s some of the nicest tech space in the city,” Sample said. “We’ve had small startups up to the world’s largest AI companies that have looked at it.”
However, the majority of the building, as well as the attached 1 10th Street building, is empty. About 740,000 square feet is being marketed for sublease, with some of it lingering on the market for five years.
X left San Francisco last year and established its headquarters in Austin; its Bay Area employees and operations moved to other offices in San Jose.
Office vacancy was 45.7 in Mid-Market in the second quarter, according to Kidder Mathews. Well-known tech tenants that previously planted flags in the area include Uber and Block, who were headquartered at 1355 Market, as well as software company Zendesk.
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