Google Renews 200K-SF Office Lease in Southern California
The deal was the largest office lease transaction in Orange County in the third quarter of this year, per Savills.
By Nick Trombola October 3, 2024 3:18 pm
reprints
If Google (GOOGL) was on the market for a new office space, it was just browsing.
The tech megalith during the past quarter renewed its 196,238-square-foot lease at the Irvine, Calif., office campus it has occupied since 2014, according to a new market report from Savills. The Registry first reported the news.
The 3.5-acre, 573,000-square-foot campus at 19510 and 19520 Jamboree Road is informally known as Google Center, though it houses other tenants such as East West Bank and an Equinox gym. An entity affiliated with Jack Dangermond, billionaire and founder of GIS mapping software company Esri, purchased the building in 2016 for $255 million, the Orange County Business Journal reported at the time. It’s unclear if Dangermond is still the building’s landlord.
Representatives for Google and for Dangermond did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Google’s lease renewal, which according to Savills was the largest office lease transaction in Orange County in the third quarter of this year, comes amid a period of downsizing and layoffs. The company has dismissed thousands of employees over the past few years, starting with 12,000 in early 2023, another 1,000 in early 2024, and more than 350 in May, according to tech layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi.
Google’s parent company Alphabet has meanwhile spent hundreds of millions of dollars in “exit costs” in recent years to close some of its offices and terminate lease contracts across the country.
That apparently included UCLA’s forthcoming Research Park, formerly known as One Westside, a sprawling campus on L.A.’s Westside, which the university purchased in early January for $700 million. Google had intended to occupy the campus once redevelopment was complete, signing a 14-year lease that began in 2022 and was supposed to last until 2036. Google ultimately abandoned those plans.
Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.
