It’s a story that has been common in large tech companies in San Francisco for the past few months – first, a company announces a strategy of working from home, then comes the emptying of San Francisco’s office space. But this business is incredible.
The Mission Bay headquarters of Dropbox’s file hosting service – a complex of four buildings at 1800 Owens Street – is selling for $ 1.08 billion, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.
The sale, which is expected to close before April, will mark the second largest transaction for a single property in the city’s history, second only to the $ 1.2 billion sale of the Embarcadero Center in 1998, a much larger complex.
The 750,000-square-foot property known as The Exchange is being unloaded at around $ 1,440 per square foot, breaking San Francisco’s record price per square foot. The buyer is still unknown.
The surprising sale marks yet another major technology company leaving its San Francisco offices as working from home becomes the new normal. In October, Dropbox announced that the move from office to home was permanent.
“We believe the data shows that the shift to remote work, while abrupt, was successful overall,” the company said in a blog at the time. “… In our internal surveys, most employees say they can be productive at home (almost 90%) and don’t want to go back to a rigid five-day work week at the office.”
In February, it was revealed that Uber intended to unload a large part of the office space, also in Mission Bay, before they even moved out.
Salesforce, which employs more than 9,000 people in the Bay Area, announced its “Work From Anywhere” strategy in February, estimating that more than 65% of employees will adopt the new system, based on a company survey.
In January, Digital Realty – a technical support company that employs about 1,500 people worldwide – announced the move of its headquarters to Austin, the technological capital of Texas.
Yelp’s San Francisco headquarters at 140 New Montgomery St. is also available for rental. “With more employees working remotely, we are reducing part of our footprint in San Francisco, but we will still keep our HQ office there,” said the crowdsourcing appraisal company in a statement.
Last year, Pinterest, the popular social sharing site for fixing recipes, home inspiration and more, canceled its $ 89.5 million rental agreement in San Francisco.
In another sector, Gap Inc. recently announced to employees that it will close its Old Navy offices in Mission Bay and consolidate those employees in the parent company’s Embarcadero office building.
Dropbox did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.
(SFGATE and San Francisco Chronicle are owned by Hearst, but operate independently of each other).