Big leasing moves from Meta, Google

This week we saw big leasing moves by even bigger tech companies, with Google and Meta both looking to get out of their underutilized Bay Area offices.

CBRE listed nearly 413,000 square feet of empty offices across three buildings in Redwood City that Google is looking to unload.

The search giant bought the bulk of the 106-acre Pacific Shores development in 2014 for an undisclosed sum, then occupied six buildings containing 934,000 square feet in the 23-year-old waterfront campus.

The three buildings up for lease include a 174,700-square-foot building at 1500 Seaport, a 128,300-square-foot building at 1700 Seaport and a 119,700-square-foot building at 1800 Seaport.

The city and agents told the San Francisco Business Times that AI tenants could help take up some of the empty space.

Meta looks to downsize in Fremont

Meta is also looking to offload some of its underutilized space, this time in Fremont, where it will close a fifth of its Dumbarton campus, amounting to 200,000 square feet at 6591 Dumbarton Circle, 6520 and 6504 Kaiser Drive, where it occupied the entire office buildings, according to the San Francisco Standard.

Meta real estate managers called the downsize “an opportunity to optimize our space usage.” Workers from Dumbarton and 6520 Kaiser will be moved to the Menlo Park headquarters, while those at 6504 Kaiser will relocate to other spots in the 1-million-square foot Fremont campus. In addition to the office space, the social media platform will also close its music room, help desk and two worker cafes. No closure dates were disclosed.

Though this is not the first time Meta subleased office space after a leasing binge that began before the pandemic, at the end of last year, Meta still occupied more offices than it did a year earlier, growing from 7 million square feet to 9 million square feet, according to the San Francisco Business Times, citing a regulatory filing.

Cupertino builders remedy suit

YIMBY Law, a prohousing group based in San Francisco, has sued Cupertino for denying two builder’s remedy projects with a combined 53 homes, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

Both planned to use a decades-old loophole in state housing law that allows developers to bypass zoning rules in cities that fail to certify their state-mandated housing plans, providing they include 20 percent affordable housing. The deadline was Jan. 31, 2023, but Cupertino’s housing plan was not approved until May of last year and both projects were submitted before then.

Developers are allowed 180 days after submitting a preliminary application to file a full application, or else it will expire, and 90 days after that to resolve any missing information. The state Department of Housing and Community Development says a developer can have successive 90-day periods to fix their applications, which could run indefinitely, but Cupertino’s interpretation of the law says developers’ time is up after the first 90-day period.

In a statement, Gillian Pressman, managing director for YIMBY Law, called the city’s interpretation, “absurd and unrealistic.”

“They’re clearly doing this to try and get out of building homes, just like they’ve been doing for decades,” he said.

Builder’s remedy comes to Pacifica

In related news, a coalition of international developers plan to use the tool to push through plans that have been stymied for decades to build more than 1,000 affordable homes atop a former limestone quarry in Pacifica.

The 86-acre abandoned quarry is owned by Preserve at Pacifica and Michigan-based Paul Heule, who told the San Francisco Business Times that the city has been trying to stop housing development at the site for three decades.

“We are in a housing crisis, so this project feels long overdue,” he said.

The project, dubbed Coastal Crest Residences, is backed by the Heule-owned Eenhoorn and Zeist, a multifamily developer based in the Netherlands.

Plans call for 80-percent workforce housing, which is homes affordable to middle-income families, while another 20 percent would be set aside for low-income households.

Cypress Capital expands rental portfolio in SF

Cypress Capital Investments fought off a bidding war to pick up a 29-unit three-story Marina District complex with an interior courtyard and parking for 45 cars for $17.5 million, or just over $600,000 per unit. That’s nearly twice as much as the citywide average of $317,000 per unit for five-plus-unit buildings, according to Compass data for the first quarter of 2025.

Adam Filly of Compass represented both the buyer and seller, the estate of the long-time owner, and told Real Tactics Pro that the sale of 3322 Buchanan is the city’s most expensive per-door trade “by a wide margin” so far this year.

Brasseaux was busy in the latter half of last year, buying several other apartment buildings in the city in just a few months. He declined to comment on the Marina buy, but Filly said, “Institutional quality assets on the north side of San Francisco are extremely rare and Garrett and his capital partners recognized that they may not see another opportunity like this for years to come.”