Lyft To Shrink Office Footprint by 45%

Lyft is planning to sublease almost half of the total of 615K SF of office space it occupies in San Francisco, NYC, Seattle and Nashville.

Like many other companies across the US, the ride-sharing firm implemented a hybrid work strategy earlier in the year that it has now decided to make permanent.

The company said its office occupancy declined after it adopted a “fully flexible” work policy in March that let its employees work wherever they wanted.

“While we continue to believe that in-person connections are important, many of our team members opted to work remotely after we shifted to a flexible workplace strategy,” said Rachel Goldstein, Lyft’s VP of real estate development, in a statement.

“As a result, we have identified a significant amount of office space that isn’t being utilized the way it previously [has been],“ Goldstein said.

Lyft’s office footprint includes 11,000 square feet the firm leases at 245 West 17^th Street in NYC, an office it opened in 2017.

The company indicated it is willing to sublease less than an entire floor of its current footprint, but it will not convert that space to co-working facilities, keeping it separate from space used by its workers.

The San Francisco office market has experienced the worst clobbering from companies that have decided to reduce their office footprints in SF. Last month, one of the city’s largest employers joined the list of tech companies downsizing or abandoning their office footprints in San Francisco to embrace hybrid and remote work strategies.

Salesforce, headquartered in San Francisco—where it occupies two office towers with its name on them—announced it is listing for subleasing about 412K SF of the 817K SF, 43-story Salesforce West tower on Fremont St., according to a report in the San Francisco Business Times.

Salesforce will maintain ownership of the building and may reoccupy the space in the future, a Salesforce spokesperson said, in a statement. About 352K SF of the sublease listing became available August 1, with the rest being vacated in December.

“We are subleasing floors in Salesforce West to make the most efficient use of our real estate footprint. As the largest private employer in San Francisco, we are deeply committed to the city and are actively welcoming employees back to Salesforce Tower,” the company’s statement said.

Despite the pledge to bring employees back to its HQ, Salesforce has fully embraced its “Success from Anywhere, Careers Everywhere” strategy, which gives employees a say in how much work they do in the office and makes hybrid/remote work a permanent part of the corporate culture.