Salesforce to exit 30-story namesake tower in Downtown SF

Sublease of 104K sf part of cost-cutting strategy to shed more than 1M sf in city

Salesforce's Marc Benioff and 350 Mission Street (Getty, Dead.rabbit, CC BY-SA 4.0 - via Wikimedia Commons)
Salesforce's Marc Benioff and 350 Mission Street (Getty, Dead.rabbit, CC BY-SA 4.0 - via Wikimedia Commons)

A 30-story office tower known as Salesforce East in Downtown San Francisco will soon empty out of Salesforce workers.

The San Francisco-based management software firm will sublease the last 104,000 square feet of offices it holds at 350 Mission Street, marking its latest real estate reduction, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

Salesforce had leased the entire 455,400-square-foot building more than a decade ago from Kilroy Realty.

It’s the latest move by the city’s largest employer to shed more than 1 million square feet of office space in San Francisco during the era of remote work. The cost-cutting move, involving thousands of job losses, was announced in a January regulatory filing.

Salesforce said it expects to incur $450 million to $650 million in charges associated with real estate office reductions.

The latest listing is being marketed by Cushman & Wakefield, and includes the top four floors of Salesforce East, billed as “plug and play view space.” The listing also includes the tower’s fifth and sixth floors. 

The top floors are available for leasing through September 2028 and the bottom floors through 2032, according to the Business Times. 

In March 2021, Salesforce subleased 339,000 square feet of the east tower to Yelp and Sephora. About the same time, it canceled its 325,000-square-foot lease at the unbuilt Transbay Parcel F tower at 550 Howard Street.

Sign Up for the undefined Newsletter

Last month, the company listed six floors for sublease at its corporate headquarters at the 61-story Salesforce Tower at 415 Mission Street, the city’s tallest building. That meant shrinking its 875,000-square-foot hub by 125,000 square feet, or 14 percent.

Boston Properties owns the fully leased tower, which has 1.41 million rentable square feet.

Slack, a workplace messaging software company owned by Salesforce, said in February it would move its 250,000-square-foot SoMa headquarters into the Salesforce Tower, but declined to say how much space it would take. In February of last year, Slack listed for sublease 200,000 square feet of offices at 45 Fremont Street.

In July, Salesforce put more than 400,000 square feet of office space, about half of its 43-story Salesforce West tower at 50 Fremont Street in the Financial District, up for lease. That marked its third office cut since the pandemic.

Read more

In March 2020, Salesforce bought a five-story office building at 450 Mission Street, across the street from Salesforce Tower, for $145 million. It still owns the property, but the company doesn’t occupy offices there.

The office vacancy in San Francisco just hit 32.7 percent, according to Savills, which has put the city on a national watchlist as “the most empty downtown in America.” 

— Dana Bartholomew