In 2021, a little over a year into the pandemic, financial technology startup Brex went “headquarterless.” It closed its San Francisco offices in a move it reasoned would save on expenses and let the firm lure the best workers wherever they happened to be.
“The truth is that talent is spread across the world,” company cofounders Pedro Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras wrote in a note to employees in 2021. Both executives moved to Los Angeles.
These days, however, some of the best artificial intelligence talent — not to mention capital — is returning to San Francisco, real estate professionals say. The AI boom has spurred leasing in recent months, increasing optimism that the tech industry will once again rescue San Francisco’s economy and a property market that includes one of the nation's highest office vacancy rates in the wake of the pandemic.
Brex, a provider of credit cards and AI-powered banking software for startups and other businesses, confirmed it has leased 100,000 square feet at 270 Brannan St. in the city’s SoMa, or South of Market Street, neighborhood, in one of the year's largest office deals.
The move marks "an exciting new chapter in our growth and our commitment to the Bay Area,” a company spokesperson told CoStar News in an email.
The new offices are significantly larger than Brex’s previous headquarters, which spanned 60,000 square feet a few blocks away at 405 Howard St.
Hot neighborhood
The story of its new building at 270 Brannan St. mirrors the ups and downs of San Francisco’s downtown office market in the past decade.
The property, built in 2016 at the height of San Francisco’s last tech boom by Mitsui Fudosan America Inc. and San Francisco-based SKS Partners, featured “a flexible, open floor plan suited for tech companies,” according to CoStar's LoopNet. It housed software giant Splunk until the firm followed in the footsteps of a stream of San Francisco tech companies and departed the building for a much smaller office space nearby, leaving the building vacant by 2022.
These days, however, SoMa is enjoying a resurgence thanks to the AI industry. Startups are drawn by the neighborhood’s proximity to freeways that provide convenient access to Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the Bay Area and its relatively cheap rents in comparison to the Class A office buildings of the Financial District, said Chris Pham, a JLL senior analyst who tracks the artificial intelligence sector. “The neighborhood has historically been a hotbed for startups,” Pham told CoStar News.
Zip, a startup that makes AI-powered business procurement software, has inked a lease for 75,000 square feet at 680 Folsom St. in SoMa. Harvey AI, a provider of automation services for the legal industry, agreed to fill about 92,000 square feet over several floors at Kilroy Realty's SoMa building at 201 Third St.
“There’s a whole network community” in areas like SoMa, Mission Bay and surrounding neighborhoods, Pham said. “They can meet up after work, bounce ideas off of each other.”
The bottom line, Pham said, is that San Francisco is emerging as the center of the AI industry: “If they want to be able to attract talent, they need to be here.”
Office push
Brex is not the first business to celebrate an office-less existence in the early days of the pandemic shutdown, only to reverse itself.
Cryptocurrency giant Coinbase paid tens of millions of dollars to officially ditch its global headquarters in 2021. This year, the firm inked a deal for 150,670 square feet to replant its corporate flag at San Francisco's Mission Rock development.
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is among the big players feeding office demand in the city, finalizing two major deals within a span of less than two years and stretching its regional footprint to occupy a total of about 1 million square feet in the city. The firm this year leased an entire 315,000-square-foot building at 550 Terry A. Francois Blvd. in the city’s Mission Bay neighborhood, a deal that came less than a year after OpenAI’s agreement to take over two buildings it subleased from Uber in late 2023.
AI companies have expanded their collective footprint in the city to more than 5 million square feet over the past couple of years, according to data from real estate services firm CBRE.
The firm estimates the sector has the potential to stretch beyond 21 million square feet over the next half decade.
If that demand materializes, it could cut down San Francisco's record-high vacancy rate by about half and catapult the city back to its pre-pandemic standing as one of the strongest office markets in the world, according to CBRE.