Twitter’s new Oakland office was supposed to appeal to East Bay commuters. Now the never-opened office is up for sublease a year after the company took the space.
The San Francisco-based social media company has listed its 66,000-square-foot office for sublease at 1330 Broadway, the San Francisco Business Times reported.
The firm had leased four floors last September as a satellite office for East Bay employees, but never opened the doors to workers. The building is owned by TMG Partners, based in San Francisco, and global investment firm KKR, based in New York.
Cresa holds the sublease listing.
The move comes after the social media giant cut staff and froze hiring in July following a loss of $270 million in the second quarter as advertising spending fell.
In addition to the Oakland pullback, it announced it would vacate its 110th Street office, connected to its 1355 Market Street headquarters in San Francisco.
Twitter had sought to sublease 174,000 square feet across five floors there, roughly a fifth of its entire headquarters. The company is exiting another four floors for a total of nine.
Twitter allows employees to work from home, forever. Its 66,000-square-foot Downtown Oakland satellite office was among its first designed around a hybrid work model.
As recently as January, it had planned to expand its San Francisco headquarters by almost 80,000 square feet.
The crash of Twitter’s Oakland satellite will impact a downtown office market that is among the worst in the Bay Area.
Class A space in Oakland’s City Center core business district, which includes 1330 Broadway, recorded a 37 percent vacancy rate in the third quarter, according to Cushman & Wakefield, with more than 2 million square feet of empty space. Overall downtown vacancies stood at 32 percent.
TMG and KKR acquired 1330 Broadway, located next to the 12th Street BART Station, in 2018. TMG then renovated its main lobby and entrance, added common area finishes and updated its building systems, elevators and conference rooms..
Tech, however, hasn’t flocked to Oakland. Except for Zendesk, which subleased at least a floor from WeWork near Lake Merritt, and Credit Karma, which opened up its Oakland headquarters in February, the city’s base of tech employers hasn’t been bolstered by the pandemic, according to the Business Journal.
— Dana Bartholomew
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