Facebook to Lease 767,000-SF Bay Area Office Campus

Facebook revealed plans to lease an office campus now under construction in Burlingame, California, a move that would boost the social networking firm's occupied space in the San Francisco Bay Area to more than 7 million square feet. The agreement would mark one of the biggest U.S. office leases the company has signed, according to CoStar data. Christopher Hom, Facebook's head of real estate and strategy planning, spoke to the Burlingame Planning Commission this week about the lease in negotiations for Burlingame Point, a 767,000-square-foot waterfront project under construction by Kylli, a subsidiary of China-based developer Genzon Property Group. The move reflects Facebook's push to expand outside its Menlo Park, California, headquarters into other parts of the Bay Area. It comes on the heels of the company announcing leases for a cumulative 1.2 million square feet in San Francisco in the past year. The new project is a $300 million development that includes four buildings at 300-333 Airport Blvd. scheduled for completion next July. "We have been very thoughtful about understanding that we needed to grow outside of Menlo Park, and we wanted to do that in a very strategic manner," Hom told commissioners at a meeting in discussing the proposed lease, which was first reported by the San Francisco Business Times. Facebook now owns or leases more than 6.4 million square feet in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, more than half of it leased over the last 12 months, according to CoStar data. Facebook confirmed in May it will take more than 1 million square feet in three of the five buildings at Jay Paul Co.'s Moffett Towers II office park in the Silicon Valley community of Sunnyvale. Two leases signed for space in San Francisco since last fall vaulted Facebook to the position of fourth-largest office tenant in the city, behind Salesforce, PG&E and Uber. Facebook confirmed plans in June to lease the entire 43-story, 760,000-square-foot Park Tower at Transbay, currently under construction in San Francisco’s Financial District, adding to the 432,000 square feet leased at 181 Fremont St. last September. It signed leases in June for 754,000 square feet in Ardenwood Corporate Commons in nearby Fremont, California. In Mountain View, Facebook leased 450,000 square feet from WeWork at 391 and 401 San Antonio Rd., taking the coworking operator's largest single coworking space, with the move scheduled for this fall.

The original article by Randyl Drummer can be viewed here.