Not even three years after debuting its high-profile North American headquarters, online payments firm Afterpay is looking to dump the space to cut costs in just the latest sign of why local and national office demand is slow to recover.
The Australian company listed for sublease all of the roughly 50,300 square feet of office space it took over in 2021 in downtown San Francisco's Phelan Building, according to marketing materials confirmed by Afterpay's parent company, Block. A team of JLL brokers has been hired to help market the space.
The listing lands as tech firms and other large office tenants are aggressively shrinking their real estate footprint in response to changes still rippling out from the pandemic that began prompting nationwide shutdowns four years ago this week. The move also reflects how these tenants are adapting to a range of challenges, from the effects of flexible work policies to economic pressures including higher interest rates, by taking a close look at how much real estate they truly need and where.
Whether it is through sublease listings or deciding not to renew existing spaces, companies are economizing their real estate portfolios by signing smaller leases or getting rid of their space altogether. Tenants have collectively dumped nearly 62 million square feet over the past year, according to CoStar analysis, pushing the total amount of move-outs since March 2020 beyond 200 million square feet. And more may be on the way for Afterpay.
“We’ve wound down certain real estate locations on the West Coast [and] I think you’ll see us make more decisions like this in the future,” Chief Financial Officer Amrita Ahuja said at a Goldman Sachs investment conference last year. “We’ve already identified incremental efficiency opportunities for this quarter and for the year, and you’ll see us do more of that work."
Not all is bad in the office market. Occupancy has slowly crept up a bit, while sublease availability has dipped slightly from a mid-2023 peak. And new types of tech businesses are willing to take office space.
Even so, there is still more than 204 million square feet sitting on the national office market, according to CoStar data, double the amount reported in 2019. More than half of the space currently available is already vacant, further underscoring tenants' eagerness to get rid of anything they no longer need or want.
Intended Company Anchor
Afterpay moved into two floors at 760 Market St. in late 2021, according to CoStar data. Prior to the lease, the company had been operating out of a much smaller space in a nearby WeWork a few blocks away at 600 California St.
At the time, Afterpay employed upward of 300 people across the Bay Area, and the Phelan Building office was intended to be an anchor for the company "at the intersection of technology, finance, shopping and culture," co-CEO Nick Molnar said in a statement shortly after the deal was signed.
Payments company Block, formerly known as Square, acquired Afterpay for $29 billion — the Oakland, California-based company's largest acquisition to date — within months of Afterpay's May 2021 lease signing for the space on Market Street.
In the years since, however, Block has offloaded hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space from its corporate portfolio, pulling as many levers as possible to curb costs and hone its focus on profitability in the face of an uncertain economic outlook and rising pressure among investors to offload extraneous expenses.
The parent company of Square, Cash App and Afterpay paid nearly $35 million in the final quarter of 2023 alone in impairment costs related to its real estate offloading spree, according to information filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. What's more, company executives have warned the cuts would likely continue.
Block is in the middle of a widespread effort to reduce its spending, an effort that has included much of its real estate, a company spokesperson told CoStar News. Its distributed workforce has expanded beyond physical offices, meaning the company is evaluating how its space is being used and trying to match its real estate portfolio with what its employees now need.
As a result, it has closed or consolidated some of its offices, with Afterpay's space at 760 Market included. The spokesperson added that employees will have the option to work from home or in one of Block's other offices in San Francisco or across the bay in Oakland.
Last year Block opted not to renew its office space at 1455 Market St., a property that had long served as its global hub before implementing a no-headquarters strategy. Before its decision not to renew the lease for the space in San Francisco's Mid-Market neighborhood, Block's real estate footprint spanned about 1 million square feet across offices in cities such as Atlanta, St. Louis, New York, Toronto, London and Portland, Oregon, according to CoStar data.
Shifting Demand
Tech companies are showing signs of playing a future role in buoying the national office market.
Artificial intelligence firms, for example, have signed a flurry of deals across the San Francisco Bay Area over the past year that have helped fill some of the city's record amount of sublease availability.
Earlier this month, Dutch fintech company Adyen signed the city's largest office deal so far this year with a 150,000-square-foot sublease at 505 Brannan St.
The company took over the space from fellow tech giant Pinterest, which had been hunting for a subtenant since dumping the office in 2020. It shows that not all executives are looking at office holdings as an unnecessary expense.
“We are an office-first company,” Davi Strazza, Adyen president of North America, said in a statement about the expansion. “We truly believe it has an impact [and it] will definitely help us accelerate in many directions that we think are important for our team dynamics.”