Airbnb lists Santa Clara campus for sublease

Airbnb has put a 301,000-square-foot office complex in Santa Clara up for sublease, underscoring how the company’s shift to a permanent work-from-anywhere model has affected its office space needs.

San Francisco-based Airbnb is seeking one or more takers for a pair of six-story buildings connected by a walkway at 4301 and 4401 Great America Parkway, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s website. The brokerage’s site says the complex is available for lease but not for sublease, but people familiar with the listing said Airbnb still rents the property and that the space isn’t being marketed directly.

The online short-term rental agency agreed in December 2019 to a 10-year lease with The Sobrato Organization, the complex’s owner, according to the property records website CompStak and a broker with knowledge of the deal. It originally planned to open the campus in two phases, the first in 2021 and the second in 2024, an Airbnb spokesperson told the Silicon Valley Business Journal in early 2020. The company hasn’t built out or occupied the property, according to a person familiar with the matter.

That tracks with Santa Clara’s online permit portal, which shows no tenant improvement applications filed after 2015 for both Great America Parkway addresses. The property’s asking rental rate is $3.50 a square foot a month, according to Cushman’s website.

Airbnb spokesperson Mattie Zazueta said in a statement that the company changed its office footprint to reflect its “live and work anywhere” approach but still keeps offices in San Francisco and the South Bay. The statement neither confirmed nor denied that it has put the Great America Parkway site up for sublease and didn’t disclose the whereabouts of Airbnb’s South Bay offices.

Cushman didn’t respond to requests for comment, while Sobrato declined to comment. That Airbnb awarded Cushman the sublease assignment for the Santa Clara site is noteworthy considering that the company enlisted CBRE to represent it in the December 2019 lease and to market five of its workspaces in San Francisco for sublease.

CBRE’s Nate Zoucha, one of Airbnb’s tenant representation brokers in the Bay Area, declined to comment.

Airbnb putting its Santa Clara campus up for sublease confirms rumors swirling for over a year in Silicon Valley’s commercial real estate industry. Speculation began in earnest that Airbnb would do so after the company laid off nearly a quarter of its workforce in May 2020. The chatter only intensified once the company embraced a work-from-anywhere model and listed space for sublease in San Francisco.

Airbnb committed to a permanent remote work model in an April blog post, eliminating location-based pay in the U.S. and allowing employees to live and work in 170 countries for up to 90 days a year in each location.

Airbnb’s business, meantime, has delivered strong results in recent quarters. It reported a profit of $379 million in the second quarter, topping analysts’ predictions by 28 percent. Airbnb said in August that it expects the third quarter to be an inflection point in the company’s pandemic recovery. It anticipates reporting the highest quarterly revenue ever for the three months ending in September, according to an August CNN Business report.

The company’s latest annual report said it leases about 941,000 square feet in San Francisco, about half of which is available for sublease. Its sublease inventory in the city has since increased to more than 600,000 square feet across five properties, according to CBRE’s website.

Airbnb hasn’t listed for sublease its headquarters at 888 Brannan Street, where the company has 288,000 square feet. Its lease doesn’t expire for several years, according to people familiar with the matter.

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