In late 2021 — over a year into the pandemic and mass shift to remote work — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram snapped up several Silicon Valley offices in a deal one developer called the biggest private-sector U.S. office lease of the year. But the company never moved in.
This week, as the Menlo Park-based social media giant began sending out pink slips to thousands of workers, the company was also searching for takers to sublease more than a half a million square feet of Silicon Valley office space in a trio of newly redeveloped buildings in Burlingame, California.
It’s not clear exactly when Meta began looking to offload the neighboring properties at 555-577 Airport Blvd., which have been redeveloped into state-of-the-art technology and laboratory spaces called Peninsula Innovation Point.
According to marketing materials from JLL, the brokerage overseeing the leasing of the property, the buildings consist of 126,446 square feet at 555 Airport Blvd., 149,391 square feet at 577 Airport Blvd. and 260,663 square feet at 567 Airport Blvd., the latter being a newly constructed building that was recently finished. The current lease expires in 2039.
The two older buildings changed hands a few months before the lease deal, in mid-2021, when MassMutual paid $170 million to buy both properties from Sagard Real Estate, according to CoStar data.
Meta has said that it plans to shrink its Bay Area office portfolio that, as of the end of 2024, totaled more than 11 million square feet of space in and around its Silicon Valley headquarters, according to public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
At the same time, filings with the SEC show that the company occupied some 2 million square feet more office space at the end of last year than it did one year earlier.
In January, the firm said it was moving its teams that oversee what content is allowed on its social media platforms out of California as part of its plans to end its third-party fact-checking program, relocating those operations to places where "there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” in the words of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, according to previous reporting by CoStar News.
Meta plans to cut roughly 5% of its staff and replace them with machine learning engineers, according to the company. A spokesperson said notices regarding the job cuts, announced in mid-January, were set to go out to employees in the U.S. and other countries this week.