Social media giant Meta is putting one of its Seattle office hubs up for grabs as the firm dismantles a significant portion of its pre-pandemic real estate expansion.
The Menlo Park, California-based tech company listed roughly 196,200 square feet for sublease in the city's South Lake Union area, according to marketing materials viewed by CoStar News. It has brought on local brokerage Hazelbrook Advisors to help market the building at 300 Eighth Ave. N, one of many that Meta had scooped up prior to 2020 and is now looking to offload as it continues to make deep cuts to its global portfolio.
The sublet listing is being offered on a term that extends through the end of June 2031 with all or a portion of the space available immediately. The finished-out space includes "lightly used furniture," according to marketing materials, as well as amenities such as a full-service kitchen and several kitchenettes, a rooftop deck, bike lockers and an on-site fitness center.
Meta, formerly known as Facebook, had preleased the South Lake Union property as well as the neighboring one at 333 Eighth Ave. N. The pair of six-story buildings make up the 384,000-square-foot Arbor Blocks development at the heart of what is now one of the Seattle area's most concentrated tech hubs.
The social media company signed the agreement with developer Vulcan to take over both office properties before the project's late 2016 groundbreaking.
That prelease agreement was one of many examples underscoring the speed and alacrity with which Meta and other global tech companies had in approaching their real estate growth in the years leading up to the pandemic. Many fueled a yearslong stretch of blockbuster leases and high-profile expansions that helped bolster the national office market, competing for space that had yet to be built and scooping up whatever they could to keep up with rampant headcount growth.
Prudent growth ahead
Those days, at least for Meta, have since passed.
The company's fervor for real estate expansion has morphed into one for downsizing as it has led a host of Silicon Valley tech giants over the past couple of years in making deep cuts to their real estate portfolios by shutting down office locations, subleasing out unwanted space, terminating prelease agreements and walking away from future investments.
Since moving into the South Lake Union campus in 2019, Meta has already dumped the entirety of the Arbor Blocks West building. That space has since been scooped up by Apple as part of an agreement finalized late last year that marked the single-largest office lease to be signed in the Seattle area since the start of the pandemic half a decade ago.
The iPhone maker, which already has a significant presence in the Seattle neighborhood, is expected to officially move into the space later this year.
The newest Seattle sublet listing is the latest in Meta's widespread effort to dump office space around the world to curb costs and allocate the savings toward growth in artificial intelligence and other priority investments.
The company's shift toward a more prudent approach to real estate growth has loaded up the national real estate market with millions of square feet of available office space, especially in tech-concentrated hubs such as Seattle and around its headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Meta late last month told employees at its campus in Fremont, California, that it would be closing several offices and consolidating its regional workforce in a move "to optimize our space usage."
The company, which did not immediately respond to CoStar News' requests for comment on its Seattle presence, is also trying to dump more than half a million square feet of office space in a trio of newly redeveloped buildings north of its Silicon Valley headquarters in Burlingame. The listing spans several properties, some that Meta never formally occupied, that are operating on lease terms not set to expire until 2039.