KKR Takes Meta's Office Space at 30 Hudson Yards

KKR has nearly doubled its footprint at Related’s flagship tower at 30 Hudson Yards, absorbing 220K SF of office space that Meta Platforms declined to renew.

KKR already occupied more than 300K SF at 30 Hudson Yards, including the firm’s headquarters on the top 10 floors, when Meta announced early last month that it was declining an option to renew its lease at 30 Hudson Yards and a smaller lease at 55 Hudson Yards when both leases expire in 2024.

In 2021, KKR bought a majority stake in the top of the new tower—including an observation deck known as The Edge that juts out of the top of the spire—for more than $500M.

JLL vice chairmen Joe Messina and Steven Rotter represented KKR in the transaction to lease Meta’s space.

After Facebook parent Meta’s stock price collapsed by more than 70% last year, the social media giant announced in its Q3 earnings report that it would be taking a $2B write-down reflecting the consolidation of its offices and existing footprint.

In 2019, Meta agreed to rent more than 1.5M of office space at three new Hudson Yards towers, with the lion’s share slated for 50 Hudson Yards.

Last summer, Meta halted its plans to a further build-out of the space at 50 Hudson Yards and backed out of a deal to add 300K of space at 770 Broadway and vacated offices at 225 Park Ave.

In November, Meta announced it won’t occupy a 589K SF lease it signed last January for all of the office space in what will become Austin’s tallest building when it opens later this year, a 1.14M, 66-story mixed-use tower at 400 West Sixth Street being developed by Lincoln Property. Meta had promised to take the first 33 floors of the new building, space it now says it will sublease.

In October, a two-building Silicon Valley office campus—which has been occupied by a parade of high-profile tech players for more than five years—went back on the market in the wake of Meta’s termination of a 457K SF lease on the campus. Meta exercised its opt-out clause on pair of adjacent six-story office buildings at 391 and 401 San Antonio Road in Mountain View.

Despite the ongoing downsizing of its global office footprint, the social media giant is moving ahead with a mixed-use village it plans to build next to its Menlo Park headquarters in California.

The Menlo Park City Council last month unanimously approved Meta’s new Willow Village development, a project that envisions the transformation of a former industrial park into a walkable urban town center.

Since it first proposed the project in 2020, Meta has enhanced its plan by promising to build 1,730 units of housing, a hotel, a grocery store, a town square and an elevated curving park that will connect with its global headquarters.