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Meta will shrink its office footprint as a result of continued remote work, recalibrating a real estate portfolio that encompasses millions of square feet across the country.
The tech giant's termination of a 200K SF lease in Manhattan four years early was just the first step in a broader evaluation of the company's footprint, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
Part of that evaluation includes reorganizing its offices, and Meta isn’t ruling out the possibility of scaling down space or letting leases expire in the process.
“One of our jobs is to recalibrate our space,” Meta Vice President of Global Facilities and Real Estate John Tenanes told the WSJ. “We’re creating a smaller venue, and for the same amount of folks, but it’s a smaller venue and we’re hoping that really drives a life in the building: more energy, more activity.”
The company’s space needs have dramatically altered since 2020. The company has a very flexible policy about where its employees work, the WSJ has reported. Tenanes said that right now, Meta offices are about half full, whereas pre-pandemic they were usually about 75% occupied. Meta is also shrinking its workforce: In late September, it announced plans to freeze hiring, restructure teams and reduce its headcount for the first time since Facebook’s founding.
There weren’t specific details about which cities or offices would be affected by this new approach or how much square footage could be on the chopping block. Tenanes did say that Meta is weighing whether it will retain offices that it has leased but not yet moved into as well as buildings where build-outs are still in progress, but did not share specifics with the WSJ.
After years of rapidly expanding, a number of big-name tech companies have done an about-face over the last year, shrinking their office footprints. Airbnb gave up 150K SF in San Francisco last week, moving closer to a fully remote workplace. It has also put roughly 300K SF of office space up for sublease in the Silicon Valley city of Santa Clara, according to CoStar.
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