Adobe Aims to Sublease 155K sf of Offices in San Francisco

Adobe is putting 155,000 square feet of offices in San Francisco’s Showplace Square up for sublease.

The San Jose-based software firm has listed for sublease three floors of the South Building at 100 Hooper Street, the San Francisco Standard reported, citing a Colliers marketing brochure.

The 417,00-square-foot office building owned by Los Angeles-based Kilroy Realty is 95.5 percent occupied.

The furnished Adobe offices, offered separately or as a whole, are available through August 2031, and include a private wellness center, gym, game room and a “tech café,” according to the brochure. The price of a sublease was not disclosed.

When Kilroy Realty broke ground in 2016 on the $270 million building, Adobe was announced as its anchor tenant. Its roughly 200,000 square feet of offices were intended to accommodate 1,500 employees. Workers took to their cubicles in 2018.

Not far away, Adobe owns and occupies a 200,000-square-foot office building at 601 Townsend Street, which at its peak held 1,000 workers.

Adobe adopted a permanent hybrid work plan during the pandemic, which includes rejiggering its local real estate. This year, it opened a 1.25-million-square-foot office in San Jose for 3,000 workers.

Showplace Square, which once sported most of San Francisco’s furniture stores, was transformed into a hub for such tech firms as Airbnb, Zynga and Salesforce, according to the Standard. But tech companies have vacated most of their offices during a shift to remote work.

Zynga moved out of 650 Townsend Street, which still sports the firm’s dog logo, and relocated its hub to San Mateo.

Airbnb whittled its multi-building campus into a single headquarters building at 888 Brannan Street.

More recently, Showplace Square has become a popular destination for AI companies, with startups such as Tome AI and Adept AI setting up shop with new leases.

Nonetheless, the Showplace Square-Potrero Hill submarket has an office vacancy rate of 30.9 percent, according to brokerage CBRE, compared with 33.9 percent across San Francisco.

John Kilroy, owner of Kilroy Realty, this summer called upon San Francisco leaders to address the city’s crime, homelessness, empty offices and vacant storefronts.

“If you’ve ever been involved in an intervention of somebody who’s an alcoholic or a drug addict, you’re not going to get any place unless they … hit bottom. And they want to change,” Kilroy told analysts on an earnings call. “And that’s the way I would characterize San Francisco.”

— Dana Bartholomew