In the latest Bay Area corporate headquarters shift, Iconiq Capital is packing its belongings to sublease office space across San Francisco’s Downtown.
The privately held wealth management firm that serves tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Jack Dorsey has subleased 88,600 square feet at 300 Mission St., a 24-story skyscraper in the Financial owned by Paramount Group, the San Francisco Business Times reported, citing unidentified sources.
Iconiq Capital subleased the space from Autodesk in a new office it vacated after eight months as it cut its global office portfolio.
The San Raphael-based software company had leased a 117,000-square-foot office there in 2019 and designed it with collaborative workspaces and features, including a music studio and game room.
The publicly traded company said the sublease has a remaining term of 9.5 years, according to regulatory filings.
Iconiq is now based at 394 Pacific St., owned by Grosvenor America, but is relocating its corporate headquarters to 300 Mission, according to the Business Times.
The registered investment advisor to tech billionaires nearly quadrupled the number of employees since June 2020, with nearly 300 employees, according to RIABiz. It also saw its managed assets grow from $12.5 billion in 2015 to $89 billion in March.
The firm has moved well beyond just serving the ultra wealthy, according to Bloomberg. It’s now an institutional asset manager with pension funds such as the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board among its fund investors.
This month, Iconiq bought a minority stake in Madison Realty Capital, a real estate investment firm based in New York, with an office in Los Angeles, for an undisclosed sum. The firm has done about $20 billion worth of real estate debt and equity deals, and just raised $2 billion for its latest debt fund.
The move is the latest in a corporate musical chairs in office space, as Bay Area companies led by tech firms adjust their needs to remote work models brought on by the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020.
Autodesk announced in regulatory filings in January that while it planned to keep its corporate headquarters in San Rafael, it would close a portion of another San Rafael office located at 3900 Civic Center, as well as the San Francisco office.
The company said it would be reducing its office portfolios worldwide and taking impairment charges of about $180 million, depending on market conditions as it disposed of the leases. The company said it was rethinking its real estate needs as more of its employees were exercising flexible workplace options.
Farella Braun + Martel, a 60-year-old real estate law firm in San Francisco, just announced it would vacate 15 floors in the prestigious Russ Building for a smaller home in the Financial district.
Last month, digital real estate platform Qualia Labs listed its 39,0000-square-foot headquarters in San Francisco for sublease. Executives say it may move to Austin, Texas.
The Qualia relocation also follows recent corporate moves by Yelp, Ripple, Splunk, Wells Fargo, and the State Bar of California, which mostly downsized to smaller offices in favor of a hybrid office and work-from-home employee model.
TaskRabbit, a worker-for-hire platform with more than 300 employees, announced last month it would be closing its San Francisco headquarters and all its physical offices to work remotely.
Not every Bay City company is downsizing. Finix, a payments company, just moved its headquarters from South Park to larger offices within a century-old Art Deco building in SoMa.
[San Francisco Business Times] – Dana Bartholomew