OpenDoor closes lease on smaller headquarters in San Francisco

OpenDoor has shut the doors on more offices at hubs in San Francisco.

The locally based proptech firm led by Carrie Wheeler has moved its headquarters for the second time in two years to a 20,400-square-foot office at 100 Montgomery Street, in the Financial District, the San Francisco Business Times reported, citing an unidentified source.

The lease from owner Vanbarton Group, based in New York, runs through May 2026. Financial terms of the lease were not disclosed.

The iBuyer uprooted last month from a 45,000-square-foot office it subleased at 303 2nd Street. 

The move makes for a 55 percent smaller corporate office — and marks a 75 percent reduction from its San Francisco headquarters footprint since 2021.

OpenDoor, which went public in 2020, once leased more than 80,000 square feet for its headquarters at 1 Post Street. It then executed an early exit of that lease in the fall of 2020, as tech firms led a broad shift to remote work.

For a time, OpenDoor listed a 100,000-square-foot office in Tempe, Ariz., as its principal executive office, according to regulatory filings. But the company denied ever making such a move, according to the Business Times.

In early 2022, OpenDoor hopped over to 2nd Street, according to CoStar, before slamming the door to that headquarters when the sublease ran out this spring.

It began moving last month into the 25-story, 436,900-square-foot tower at 100 Montgomery. 

Built in 1955 and renovated in 2009 and 2015, the white marble Equitable Life Building with Art Deco-style windows was among the first post-World War II office buildings in San Francisco. Highlights include a fitness center, conference center and beehive harvesting on the roof.

San Francisco is not the only city where Opendoor has whittled down its footprint.

At the end of last year, the company leased 53,900 square feet of offices in Tempe, down from the more than 100,000 square feet a year earlier, according to a regulatory filing. Its largest office is now in Georgia, where it leases 71,000 square feet in Atlanta.

The reductions followed a massive cutback to its workforce. In the spring of last year, Opendoor laid off 680 people, or 22 percent of its employees.

Other iBuyers, which offer homesellers instant cash at below-market rates in return for an expedited process, have been hit hard by a challenging housing market during higher interest rates, according to the Business Journal.

Last month, the Federal Trade Commission announced that homeowners who sold their properties to Opendoor could get $62 million in refunds because of deceptive business practices. The company “strongly disagreed” with the decision, contending it did nothing wrong.

“Most people who sold to Opendoor made thousands of dollars less than they would have made selling their homes using the traditional process and many paid more in costs than what sellers typically paid,” the FTC said in a statement. 

In the settlement, the company is barred from making deceptive or unsubstantiated claims to consumers. In California, the FTC will spend $4 million from the settlement to compensate 2,472 buyers.  

— Dana Bartholomew

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