Yelp to move headquarters, lease smaller space in city

Yelp, the San Francisco company with a noted business review site, said it plans to relocate its headquarters in the city after putting much of its current space up for lease as remote work and the coronavirus continue to reshape the city’s tech sector.

The company said it will occupy 53,596 square feet in three floors at 350 Mission St. in SoMa, only a few blocks away from its current 161,876-square-foot lease at 140 New Montgomery St. The company will be subleasing the space from Salesforce.

Most of the current lease expires Sept. 30, according to an emailed responses from Ed Jajeh, the company’s vice president of tax, treasury and workplace

Much of the space on New Montgomery was listed as available earlier this year. The new lease will run for approximately nine years, according to Jajeh.

The company said it is planning to bring back employees who want to spend time in the office by early next year, but will require vaccinations for anyone coming back to their U.S. offices.

Yelp had originally planned to bring some employees back to its Phoenix office, but said in a blog post Thursday those plans have since been pushed back to Sept. 15 in light of the surge in virus cases driven by the more contagious delta variant.

Continuing to allow flexible remote work for most employees underlies the decision to move to the new space.

“We’ve been evaluating our real estate footprint as we look to best accommodate our now remote-first workforce, and while we plan to continue to have offices in the cities where we’re currently located, we no longer need the same amount of space that we had in the past,” the company said in a statement.

Yelp also has offices in Chicago and New York that it reportedly was seeking to sublease earlier this year.

Other tech companies, including Twitter and Dropbox, have sought to sublease parts of their headquarters during the pandemic to offload unused space as employees began to work from home, some for good.

Yelp was among the first companies locally to conduct layoffs during the onset of the pandemic last April, laying off 1,000 workers and furloughing 1,100 more, around a third of its staff at the time, although many of their number were recalled months later.

San Francisco event and ticketing website Eventbrite also laid off 450 employees, close to half its workforce, around that time. In a related move, the San Francisco Business Times reported Wednesday that Eventbrite opted not to renew its nearly 100,000square-foot lease at 155 5th St. that expired in May and will instead sublease a much smaller 13,335 square-foot space from real estate startup Zillow at 535 Mission St.

Eventbrite confirmed the move in an email, saying the expiration of its lease was “a natural point in time to reevaluate our office space in San Francisco and ensure it meets the needs of our new hybrid workforce.”