This story was updated Aug. 5 to say Meta has signed an agreement to extend its lease for part of its Playa Vista portfolio.
A slice of Meta's office portfolio has hit the market after a yearslong effort from the tech giant to offload the Los Angeles property.
Tishman Speyer has listed more than 182,120 square feet for lease at 12105 W. Waterfront Drive in Playa Vista, California, ahead of Meta’s natural lease expiration for that space in 2026. Meta will still occupy roughly 20% of that building and will continue to lease the entirety of neighboring 12126 W. Waterfront as part of a recent lease extension that runs through 2034, people familiar with the recent deal tell CoStar News.
JLL has started marketing the multi-floor space that Meta took over in the years leading up to the pandemic.
The two buildings make up the more than 437,725-square-foot Brickyard complex, located a short drive from the Pacific Ocean coastline and to the west of downtown Los Angeles. Meta — then known as solely as Facebook — in late 2018 signed on to take over the entirety of the two buildings as it looked to bolster its real estate presence up and down the West Coast.
Those full-building deals exemplified the speed with which Meta and other global tech companies had in approaching their real estate growth in the years leading up to the pandemic. Those firms fueled a yearslong stretch of high-profile expansions to keep up with rampant headcount growth, helping bolster the national office market.
Those days, at least for Meta, have since passed.
Deepening cuts
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.
The social media giant let a portion of its Playa Vista lease lapse when it expired late last year and has taken a variety of tactics to gradually whittle away its remaining footprint.
Those ongoing downsizing moves have been part of 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.
Since the start of this year alone, the Menlo Park, California-based company has listed for sublease the second of two Seattle office buildings it had preleased prior to the pandemic. Meta also recently 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.