Salesforce.com Inks 714 KSF Space, Largest Office Lease in San Francisco History

By Scott Baltic, Contributing Editor

In the largest office lease in San Francisco’s history, Boston Properties and Hines, co-developers of what will be the United States’ tallest office building west of Chicago, have signed Salesforce.com as the tower’s anchor/name tenant. The company, touted as the world’s number-one CRM (customer relationship management) platform, will take 30 floors and 714,000 square feet in the 61-story, 1.4-million-square-foot 415 Mission St. building, renamed as of now to Salesforce Tower.

The deal was announced Friday by the parties to the lease, as well as by Cushman & Wakefield, which represented Salesforce.com in the negotiations.

Salesforce.com, which was founded in San Francisco 15 years ago, will be taking floors 1, 3–30 and 61 in the building.

The company is already San Francisco’s largest tech employer, with more than 4,000 employees in the Bay Area. (It has more than 13,000 worldwide.) It also plans to hire more than 1,000 additional personnel in the Bay Area this year.

Its current San Francisco offices include 50 Fremont St. and 350 Mission St., very close to Salesforce Tower, and its official headquarters address is The Landmark @ One Market, a 1916-vintage building at One Market Plaza, along the Embarcadero.

In all, Salesforce.com projects that its San Francisco locations will total more than 2 million square feet by 2017.

“Salesforce Tower represents an incredible milestone in our company’s history—it will be the heart of our global headquarters in San Francisco,” Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, said in a release. “We founded salesforce.com in San Francisco 15 years ago and this expansion of our urban campus represents our commitment to growing in the city.”

The $1.1 billion building, earlier known as 101 First St. and also as Transbay Tower, is pre-certified as LEED Platinum and will feature floor-to-ceiling (10-foot-high) glass, 13-9 ceilings and column-free floor plans.

Below-grade improvements and site work for the building are under way. The tower is scheduled for completion in early 2017.

The 1-acre site is across the street from the Transbay Transit Center, which will connect various rail and bus lines, paratransit services, and a proposed California high-speed rail project.

The Cushman & Wakefield leasing team was led by vice chairman Dan Harvey and included account director Tori Hockersmith, senior directors Michael Griffiths and John Coons, and account manager Anna Jensen.

Buoyed by strong job growth, San Francisco’s office market is very active, according to a first-quarter report from Cushman & Wakefield. Leasing activity in the first quarter totaled about 1.9 million square feet, unusually high for a first quarter and driven in part by several large leases to tech companies, including Twitter, Dropbox and LinkedIn.

The overall vacancy rate in the South Financial District was 9.5 percent on an inventory of barely less than 24 million square feet. The overall weighted-average gross rental rate (all classes) was $57.62.