Meta is looking to shed about 115,000 square feet in its Chicago office, expanding the Facebook parent’s efforts to slash expensive real estate after announcing plans for 10,000 new global layoffs.
The company is seeking to put up for sublease five floors of its 263,000-square-foot space at 151 N. Franklin St. in Chicago’s Loop business district soon, the company said Thursday. Meta seeks one or more tenants to take its space on floors 19, 20, 27, 28 and 29, a spokesman said in an email to CoStar News. Those floors total 115,280 square feet, according to CoStar data.
In a similar downtown Chicago development, software giant Salesforce is expected to offload as much as 125,000 square feet of office space in its 60-story namesake skyscraper, CoStar News reported Thursday. Tech companies have been seeking to slash expenses three years into COVID-19.
Meta has been aggressively cutting back its global real estate footprint, most recently putting a roughly 252,000-square-foot property on the sublease market near its headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
Earlier this month, Meta disclosed plans to lay off 10,000 workers globally after already making 11,000 cuts in November.
In a letter to employees, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company plans restructuring and layoffs in its tech groups in late April, with similar moves planned for business groups in late May.
Shedding Space
In Chicago, San Francisco-based Uber last month put more than 50,000 square feet of its space in the Old Post Office on the sublease market. That continued the company’s efforts to downsize an Uber Freight headquarters that once covered 463,000 square feet in the sprawling former old main post office along the Chicago River.
Uber’s offering followed larger sublease spaces hitting the market in Chicago, including Publicis Groupe listing 350,000 square feet in the former Leo Burnett Building at 35 W. Wacker Drive. After moving jobs to its Arkansas headquarters, Tyson Foods put all 233,000 square feet of its space at 400 S. Jefferson St. up for sublease.
Meta’s space is fully built out and ready for a sublease tenant to move in, according to people familiar with the situation.
Facebook leased the 263,000-square-foot space on North Franklin in 2018 and initially was supposed to move there from a nearby building in early 2020, before those plans were delayed by the pandemic’s arrival in March 2020. Facebook, whose holding company changed its name to Meta in late 2021, began moving large numbers of workers into the 35-story high-rise last year.
The Franklin Street tower, developed by Chicago-based John Buck Co., also is known as the CNA Center. Insurer CNA Financial is the largest tenant, leasing 298,000 square feet, according to CoStar data.
Plans to shed office space in Chicago come just weeks after Zuckerberg and his pediatrician wife, Priscilla Chan, announced they were investing $250 million in a new biotech hub in Chicago. It would be the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s second life science hub, following one launched in San Francisco in 2021.