Twitter expands Bay Area office presence with 66,000-square-foot lease in Oakland

Updated Sept. 10, 2:57 p.m.: This story has been corrected to reflect that TMG Partners and KKR co-own the building at 1330 Broadway.

Twitter Inc. is expanding its Bay Area presence with its first office in Oakland, the social media giant announced Friday.

The company has signed a lease for more than 66,000 square feet over four floors at 1330 Broadway in downtown Oakland, according to a news release and a Twitter spokesperson. The new office is Twitter’s third in the Bay Area outside of San Francisco and San Jose and is slated to open late next year, the spokesperson said.

The workspace will be among the first that Twitter will design with a hybrid work model in mind, Tracy Hawkins, the company’s vice president of real estate, workplace and remote experience, said in a Friday Twitter thread. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told his employees in May 2020 that many of them will be allowed to work remotely as long as they please, and 95% of its workforce has told the company that they plan to either work from home full time or work from the office a few days a week, the spokesperson said.

“We’re continuing to look at ways to support a more distributed workforce and better meet our employees and talent where they are and where they want to be,” Hawkins said in her Twitter thread. The company is currently headquartered in San Francisco, where “we’ll always have a home,” Hawkins said. It plans to maintain a “considerable” presence in San Francisco and open its new, 33,000-square-foot office within the Santana Row mixed-use center in San Jose once it feels it’s safe to do so, the spokesperson said. All of the company’s offices in the United States are currently closed, the spokesperson added.

Although Twitter decided last year to allow most of its employees to work from home permanently, it still maintained plans to expand into Oakland. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in July that the company was close to signing a lease for 64,000 square feet of space at 1330 Broadway. That address is home to an 18-story, 320,000-square-foot Class A office building that’s next to the 12th Street BART Station.

Developer TMG Partners and investment firm KKR, which together own the trophy asset, recently renovated its lobby area and entrance and refurbished its conference facilities, among other upgrades, according to a Friday news release.

“The Oakland office market has maintained strong tenant demand from companies both growing their footprint in Oakland and those looking to move to Oakland for its strong workforce, diverse lifestyle, entertainment options, transportation, and ample housing options,” David Cropper, TMG’s director of development, said in the news release. “Together with KKR, we are proud to welcome Twitter to 1330 Broadway as a long-term tenant,” Cropper said.

Twitter’s expansion into Oakland “demonstrates that major employers are still drawn to our city’s unique cultural amenities and creative energy,” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said in a statement.

Cushman & Wakefield Executive Director John Dolby represented TMG and KKR during lease negotiations, while managing principal Christina Clark and senior vice president Matt Lehman of Cresa represented Twitter in the deal. Representatives for both TMG and Twitter declined to disclose the length of Twitter’s lease on 1330 Broadway or how much it’s paying at the start of its lease term.

The company’s Oakland footprint is roughly one-tenth the size of its San Francisco presence, which reportedly totaled about 800,000 square feet as of last fall. It listed nearly 105,000 square feet of that space for sublease last year, the San Francisco Chronicle reported in September 2020. And Twitter CEO Dorsey said in an earnings call in February 2020 that its concentration of employees in San Francisco “is not serving us any longer, and we will strive to be a far more distributed workforce, which we will use to improve our execution.”