In a week sure to cause office brokers and landlords some agita, it seemed nary a day went by without some major company announcing a downsizing of its office space.
First it was BuzzFeed consolidating two 217,000-square-foot Manhattan offices to only 107,000 square feet at the former New York Times headquarters at 229 West 43rd Street. The media company took over that office after it bought Complex Networks for $300 million last year and said it had more than enough space to house both companies.
Then accounting firm KPMG cut more than 40 percent of its Manhattan office footprint by consolidating to 456,000 square feet at 2 Manhattan West followed by Lyft announcing plans to sublease 45 percent of its 615,000 square feet spread across San Francisco, New York City, Seattle and Nashville, Tenn. It’s unclear how much of Lyft’s 11,000 square feet at 245 West 17th Street will be on the chopping block.
Those firms joined Amazon, Facebook, Yelp, UBS, Netflix, HSBC Bank USA, Twitter and Salesforce in pulling back on their office footprint in recent weeks. And it wasn’t just office feeling the shrink.
The aforementioned Amazon, industrial’s favorite tenant, plans to close or delay the opening of 49 delivery processing centers in the United States, soon after the e-commerce behemoth decided to cut the middle man out and just buy other warehouses itself.
Many have pointed to the fact that remote work seems here to stay as the reason for the office shrink. However,…
