Yelp Looks to Sublease a Third of HQ in Second Trim Since 2021

Yelp is downsizing its corporate hub in San Francisco for the second time in three years.

The locally based business review firm has listed for sublease 18,000 square feet of its headquarters at 350 Mission Street, in South of Market, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. That’s a third of its 53,600-square-foot hub at the 30-story tower known as Salesforce East.

“As a fully remote organization, we regularly evaluate our footprint to align with the needs of our business and have put a portion of our San Francisco office at 350 Mission Street on the sublease market,” an unidentified company spokesperson said in an email to the newspaper.

The announcement comes three years after Yelp relocated into three floors at Mission Street in the fall of 2021 — a third of the size of its former headquarters at 140 New Montgomery Street.

The recent listing at a building owned by Los Angeles-based Kilroy Realty means Yelp has tried to whittle down its office space in San Francisco by 78 percent.

During the pandemic, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman gave offices in general poor reviews. The “future of work is remote,” he declared in a 2022 blog post.

At the same time, Stoppelman closed Yelp offices in New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Last year, Yelp shuttered offices in Phoenix and in Hamburg, Germany.

Its San Francisco office is the last in the U.S., while the firm has two remaining international offices in Toronto and London.

Yelp’s haircut at its corporate headquarters occurs after the city’s office vacancy rate last month hit 35.9 percent, a record. The office exodus, launched by tech firms in a shift to remote work during the pandemic, is expected to get worse.

Last week, global design agency AKQA listed 67,000 square feet of its 114,800-square-foot San Francisco office at 360 Third Street on the sublease market.

“Over the past few years, we’ve transitioned to a hybrid model, which makes such a large office space unnecessary,” an unidentified spokesperson for AKQA told the Chronicle in an email.

In April, Salesforce announced it would sublease the last 104,000 square feet of offices it holds at 350 Mission Street, in a similar downsizing move, after leasing the entire 455,400-square-foot building more than a decade ago from Kilroy Realty.

— Dana Bartholomew