Twitter Puts 200K SF Of Its Manhattan Office Up For Sublease
As Twitter continues its tumult under new owner Elon Musk, it is trying to find a taker for its large Chelsea office.
The company has listed almost 200K SF at 245 and 249 West 17th St. in Manhattan, Bloomberg reported based on data from Savills. The properties are owned by PIMCO's Columbia Property Trust and are among a collection of buildings that the landlord recently defaulted on amid efforts to restructure its debt.
Tech companies have become an important source of tenant demand for New York City office landlords in recent years, but their pullback in the last few months has added to potential distress in the market, with some office owners considering conversion to residential properties or trying to hand the keys over to their lenders.
Although there has been a push among companies, including large tech firms like Amazon and Salesforce, to bring employees back to physical working spaces and Manhattan had an active January for office leasing, demand and usage are still not at pre-pandemic levels.
Twitter’s sublease move puts the company in step with other tech behemoths, which have also cut back on their office space in recent months. Both Amazon and Facebook parent company Meta have pulled back from office spaces in Manhattan, in addition to carrying out their own layoffs.
But while layoffs at Amazon and Facebook have been boiled down to reducing headcount to pre-pandemic levels, Twitter has spent months cutting after Musk spent $44B to acquire the social network, only to see the its revenues continue to plunge as advertisers back away from the platform.
So far, Twitter has laid off thousands of employees, including janitors and almost the entire public relations department. Columbia Property Trust also owns an office building Twitter leases in San Francisco, and it is suing Musk's company for nonpayment of rent. In late December, The New York Times reported that the cost-cutting measures had resulted in employees being forced to bring in their own toilet paper.
