Airbnb will not be exiting the Showplace Square headquarters that was built out for it a decade ago, and has now signed a lease to stay in the building until 2037.
Back in the summer of 2023, word spread that Airbnb was on the hunt for new office space and would potentially be leaving its longtime headquarters at 888 Brannan. In recent years, Airbnb has shed space in four other buildings that it occupied in the pre-pandemic era, after becoming one of the Bay Area's most work-from-anywhere-friendly companies.
Company reps said at the time that they were just "exploring options" ahead of their lease expiring in 2026.
But now, as the Chronicle reports, Airbnb has inked a lease to keep 250,000 of the 280,000 square feet of space that it holds at 888 Brannan — offices built around a grand atrium that were built out in 2013 in what was formerly known as the Gift Center Building. (The wholesale San Francisco Gift & Jewelry Center still occupies space in the building.)
The lease runs through 2037.
Airbnb put out a statement saying that it wanted to continue to keep the San Francisco office space in order that its 1,200 Bay Area employees could still come "together intentionally" on a regular or semi-regular basis. And the company said the new lease shows a "commitment to our hometown."
Though Airbnb ended up rebounding mightily during the pandemic, the company had a mass layoff in May 2020, letting go of 1,900 employees globally, six months ahead of its planned IPO in December 2020.
Airbnb's stock is trading at right around its IPO price, $134 per share today, which is well below a March high of $168, and considerably below the post-IPO days of February 2021, when it was briefly trading at $212 per share.
Many large companies in San Francisco have shrunk their office footprints in the last four years, including one of the city's biggest employers, Salesforce. Since 2021, Salesforce has let go of hundreds of thousands of square feet of offices in buildings at 350 Mission Street and 50 Fremont Street. And, following a mass layoff, the company listed six floors of Salesforce Tower for sublease in early 2023, totaling 125,000 square feet.