Roku to sublease 163K sf of its San Jose headquarters

Roku will peel away one of four buildings at its San Jose headquarters for sublease.

The streaming tech firm has listed the 162,600-square-foot building at 1143 Coleman Avenue at the Coleman Highline tech campus, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

The five-story building is available for nearly $48 per square foot. Brokers Paul McManus and Blake Zamudio of Colliers hold the listing.

The sublease listing comes six weeks after Roku announced it would lay off 6 percent of its 3,600-person workforce and exit or sublease unoccupied office space to cut costs.  It plans to spend up to $35 million for the real estate rollback.

Roku’s net loss more than doubled to $498 million last year, despite a 13 percent rise in net revenue.

The five-story building makes up part of the more than 730,000 square feet Roku leases at Coleman Highline, where it has been based since 2018. The landlord is Cupertino-based developer Hunter Storm, a unit of Hunter Properties.

Roku leases three other office buildings at 1173, 1167 and 1155 Coleman avenues, plus a 23,000-square-foot tenant benefits building. Its Coleman Highline leases run through 2029.

The building now up for sublease was rented during an expansion of its San Jose headquarters in 2019. Roku planned to occupy it in early 2021 but never moved in.

That made the property a prime target for the firm’s new cost-cutting measures.

The Coleman Highline campus, when completed, will include 1.5 million square feet of offices,  two hotels, shops and restaurants plus 1,600 apartments west of Mineta San Jose International Airport.

Yahoo signed a 15-year lease at the property for more than 600,000 square feet in 2021. But it later subleased the offices to ByteDance, the Chinese parent of TikTok.

In 2020, Hunter Storm sold 1143 and 1155 Coleman to a Blackrock-affiliated real estate investment trust for $275 million, or $770 per square foot.

In late 2021, Hunter Properties and financial partner Sansome Partners sold the formerly Yahoo-leased portion to AGC Equity Partners, a London-based investor, for $775 million, or $1,185 per square foot.

This month, Hunter Storm was approved to build a 292,500-square-foot office building to complete the eight-building Coleman Highline campus. 

— Dana Bartholomew