Snapchat parent company snags two floors in downtown Austin office tower

Snap, the parent company of social media platform Snapchat, has agreed to lease part of a downtown Austin office tower.

The California-based company recently signed a lease for two floors at an office tower in Austin’s central business district called 405 Colorado, CoStar News reported. Philadelphia-based Brandywine Realty Trust developed the 206,000-square-foot, 25-story high-rise at Colorado and Fourth streets.

CBRE’s Troy Holme, Katie Ekstrom, and Casey Ford handle office leasing for 405 Colorado, but the real estate firm declined to provide comment to The Real Deal. Officials with Snapchat and Brandywine didn’t return requests for comment.

This marks the first Texas office for Santa Monica-based Snapchat and adds to the growing list of social media company leases in Austin. TikTok, the video-based social media platform, made its lease official at 300 Colorado last month where it will occupy the top six floors, CoStar reported. In December, Facebook parent company Meta Platforms leased 33 floors of the under-construction Sixth and Guadalupe office tower.

Snapchat, co-founded by CEO Evan Spiegel, has employees worldwide with U.S. offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Mountain View, California, according to its website.

Office market leasing in Austin neared pre-pandemic levels by the end of last year as companies relocated and expanded to the metro, according to a fourth quarter report by Jones Lang LaSalle. Tower projects are also rising left and right in downtown Austin. JLL reported that office inventory has increased by 9.5 percent over the past two years, with more than 61 million square feet of inventory by the end of last year. Across the city of Austin, the office vacancy rate was at 16.4 percent during the fourth quarter.

[CoStar] — Kathryn Hardison