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Through its parent company Alphabet, search engine hegemon Google is one of the most prominent commercial real estate tenants in New York City.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based Google launched operations out of New York in the early 2000s via different small locations. But it’s biggest statement—then and to date—was the 2010 acquisition of the nearly 3 million-square-foot 111 Eighth Avenue for $1.9 billion. The building has since become Google’s East Coast headquarters and the nexus of a kind of campus on Manhattan’s lower West Side.
Its other holdings or leased property in that area include Chelsea Market and the Milk Building, two buildings connected by a pedestrian bridge and totaling more than 1.5 million square feet, as well as the planned Google Hudson Square, a collection of properties destined to comprise a 1.7 million-square-foot campus within a campus.
The moves since 2010, of course, have all been in expectation of Google growing its employee count in its East Coast hub. The company had more than 8,000 workers in New York as of 2020, and announced plans to goose that number to more than 14,000 by 2028. This is despite Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai extending the company’s work-from-home model until September 2021 due to the coronavirus and his endorsement of a kind of WFH-office hybrid after that.
As of the end of 2020, Google showed no signs of wanting to shed any of its New York presence. And the Alphabet division remains at the vanguard of the increasingly dominant tech presence in the city’s commercial real estate market.
Outside of New York, Google has that Mountain View headquarters, which runs to more than 12 square miles (with plans to create a vastly larger HQ in the same Silicon Valley city). It’s also planning a major development in downtown San Jose and in Los Angeles, where it’s one of the entities behind the redevelopment of the old Westside Pavilion mall into office space.
Finally, perhaps recognizing how its mere presences has driven up real estate costs in the San Francisco Bay Area and neighboring Silicon Valley, Google announced in late 2019 that it was going to try to create 15,000 housing units in the region. This would be done in part through rezoning land Google owns to residential.
