Meta Pulls Out Of Second Major London Office Lease

Tech giant Meta is pulling out of a second large London office building in the space of four months. 

The parent company of Facebook is shutting its location at Rathbone Place just off Oxford Street in the West End, Deadline reported. 

The move comes after Meta in September surrendered its lease at British Land’s 1 Triton Square in Euston, paying the real estate investment trust £149M to do so.

Meta occupies the entire 272K SF office space at Rathbone Place, a development that also includes 142 apartments. It is consolidating staff into its 600K SF office at King’s Cross and a 310K SF space at 10 Brock Street, up the road in Euston. 

A slowdown in growth has seen the company cut UK staff from 7,000 to 5,000 over the last year, Deadline reported. It has also pulled out of buildings it leased or was planning to lease in Manhattan and Austin, Texas, as well as in Dublin.

Rathbone Square is owned by German fund manager Deka, which bought the building from Great Portland Estates for £435M in 2017. That deal included the apartments, which have been sold off to private individuals. 

Meta has a lease on the office space that runs to 2032, at a rent of £18M a year, and neither Deka nor Meta would say whether it will pay to surrender the lease or look to sublease, Deadline reported. Deka said it was confident the space could be re-let quickly if it did receive it back, however.

At 1 Triton Square, British Land is converting offices earmarked for Meta into life sciences space, part of a wider repositioning of the Regent’s Place campus, of which the building is a part.

Bisnow’s upcoming UK Life Sciences Annual Conference will be held in the building in March.