John Tenanes
John Tenanes
Vice President of Real Estate at Facebook
The commercial real estate industry needs something to like as it comes out of the shelter-in-place orders, and for the last year or so it’s been Facebook.
The social media leader is said to be nearing an agreement to lease 740,000 square feet at Vornado’s Farley Post Office project in Manhattan. Facebook is also reportedly thinking about filling a hole at Hudson Yards, with Neiman Marcus planning to vacate its massive 188,000-square-foot store after filing for bankruptcy in May.
Both deals would be more than encouraging amid the downturn, as conversations continue about top-tier firms needing less space for the foreseeable future, and it would be an obvious score for the $1 billion Vornado development that also includes 120,000 square feet of retail space.
Facebook continued to establish its power in real estate over the past year with the largest lease (about 1.5 million square feet) in 2019 in New York City at Hudson Yards, and the company has significantly expanded with major leases in tech hubs around the country.
In the second quarter this year — when leasing activity plummeted to its lowest point since the Great Recession — Facebook added 84,600 square feet to its existing lease at Tishman Speyer’s Brickyard campus in Los Angeles. The tech firm was already signed to 220,000 square feet at the Playa Vista campus.
These deals have been market boons in spite of the fact that Facebook is also one of the companies defining the gloomy narrative going in the other direction — which has been even more powerful. In May, along with larger tech giants like Google, Facebook told employees that they can work from home through the end of the year due to the pandemic, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he would shift up to half of Facebook’s 45,000 employees to remote work over the next decade.
It has sparked fears that a wave of employers will ditch real estate expenses and expand their work-from-home strategies well beyond the end of the health crisis, which would cause demand for office space to nosedive.
The name executing Facebook’s ambitious (and sometimes mixed-message) real estate strategy is John Tenanes.
Whatever else, Tenanes has a large portfolio of real estate to look after; it includes more than three million square feet in New York City alone, according to reports.—G.C.
