Facebook Parent Meta to Downsize NoVA Office by 51K SF
The tech giant took 75,000 square feet at BXP’s Reston Town Center in 2019.
By Nick Trombola August 7, 2024 3:10 pm
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It appears some cracks are forming in the armor of BXP’s much-lauded Reston Town Center project.
Facebook’s parent company Meta is set to relinquish slightly more than two-thirds of its office space at the sprawling mixed-use district in Reston, Va., to landlord BXP, according to the Business Journal. It was not immediately clear why the tech giant is opting to downsize, but the move is in line with Meta’s large-scale plans the past few years to cut costs, which has included significantly shrinking its office footprint.
Meta signed a lease for 75,000 square feet spread over three floors at 1818 Library Street in 2019. Yet 51,000 square feet of that is set to become available by June 2025, per the Business Journal, citing a CoStar listing.
BXP President and Director Doug Linde made mention in the company’s second-quarter earnings call late last month of a “traditional tech company” cutting back space by 50,000 square feet at Reston Town Center, though it’s not explicitly clear if he was referring to Meta at the time.
“The only significant contraction in the portfolio came from a tech company downsizing in Reston,” Linde told investors on the call.
The Reston building housing Meta’s lease is a roughly 250,000-square-foot office, part of a three-property complex within Reston Town Center dubbed South of Market, per the Business Journal. The complex was 99.6 percent leased as of this past quarter, according to BXP’s recently released supplemental operating data.
Meta and BXP did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Despite Meta’s apparent downsizing at Reston Town Center, BXP clearly believes in the staying power of the 4 million-square-foot district. The real estate investment trust recently submitted proposals with Fairfax County to redevelop roughly a dozen more acres in Reston, with plans calling for five new properties totalling 2.1 million square feet — including 930,000 square feet of new office space.
The REIT’s confidence isn’t misplaced. The vacancy rate at Reston Town Center is only 4 percent, according to BXP’s second quarter earnings report. That’s a far cry from the gnarly 26.9 percent office vacancy Reston is experiencing overall at the moment, according to a recent market report from CBRE.
Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.
