Sephora takes 286K sf in SF, city’s biggest Covid-era office lease

Sephora signed San Francisco’s largest new office lease of the pandemic, a 286,000-square-foot deal across 16 floors in the city’s Transbay area.

The beauty company is subleasing from Salesforce, which scaled back offices as it embraced remote work, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The tech employer previously occupied all 30 floors in the Salesforce East tower at 350 Mission Street and put about half of it on the market for sublease last year, the Chronicle said. Sephora will move its U.S. headquarters into the building next year, consolidating offices at 425 and 525 Market Street.

“350 Mission is thoughtfully designed to support and enhance the future of work at Sephora, which puts a strong focus on our employee culture, collaboration and flexibility,” Sephora’s Jeff Gaul said in a statement to the Chronicle. The move also supports Sephora’s hybrid in-person and remote work practices while providing “ample room for growth.”

The deal is the city’s biggest new office lease since Visa agreed to rent about 300,000 square feet in Mission Rock in 2019. It supplants Chime’s 200,000-square-foot deal at 101 California Street last year as the city’s largest Covid-era office lease, excluding renewals.

New office leasing more than doubled in San Francisco last year from 2020, jumping to 4.8 million square feet from 2.2 million, the Chronicle said. Yet that number still pales in comparison to the 7.7 million square feet in 2019, according to Cushman & Wakefield. The city expects about 15 percent of office workers will still be working remotely as its economy recovers next year, which will likely slow the pace of its office market’s rebound.

[The San Francisco Chronicle] — Matthew Niksa