Slack to vacate HQ, move into parent’s Salesforce Tower

Slack, now owned by Salesforce, is moving its South of Market headquarters into the 61-story Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. 

The workplace messaging software company will relocate to 415 Mission Street, but declined to say how much space it would occupy, the San Francisco Business Times reported. The move is expected on Feb. 24, according to an employee memo first reported by Fortune.

Salesforce, which bought Slack for $27.7 billion in 2021, is making the move as part of a restructuring this year that would lay off 10 percent of its workforce and cut office leases.

“This is part of what we announced in January,” a spokesperson told the Business Journal in an email. “We will bring all employees together in Salesforce Tower.”

The relocation means that Slack will clear the desks out of its San Francisco headquarters at 500 Howard Street, where it has occupied 250,000 square feet since 2017. 

Heitman, based in Chicago, owns the building known as Foundry IV, and has leased the offices to Slack through 2027.

It’s not clear whether Slack will try to sublease the offices or try to get out of the lease.

Early last year, the company listed 208,500 square feet of offices at a 34-story skyscraper at 45 Fremont Street for sublease.

In January, when it announced a restructuring involving job cuts, Salesforce said it would incur $450 million to $650 million in office exit charges. 

The space dump serves as another blow to San Francisco’s office market, which has a vacancy rate of 27.6 percent, according to CBRE, with many tech companies moving into smaller quarters.

When Salesforce announced job and space cuts, it didn’t name locations for closure. Last summer, the firm listed 412,600 square feet for sublease at Salesforce West, or half of the building it owns at 50 Fremont Street.

Last month, Facebook parent Meta said it would shed 435,000 square feet at 181 Fremont Street, a mixed-use highrise next to Salesforce Transit Center.

“With recent reports of layoffs, particularly in big tech, and given the economic uncertainty for the first half of 2023, we expect to see an uptick in large blocks of space hitting the sublease market,” Derek Daniels, research director for brokerage Colliers, told the Business Times.