As has been widely reported, Snap, the company behind the popular messaging program Snapchat, is planning to vacate its lone downtown San Francisco headquarters.
Snap Inc.’s single New York City office is located at 875 Howard Street and spans 33,000 square feet. The corporation claims the move is related to a growing preference for telecommuting among employees and a decline in advertising spending across industries in 2022.
Since adopting a more flexible work policy, “our San Francisco site was seldom used by team members,” the business said in a statement to Bloomberg on Friday.
The Santa Monica-based startup, founded in 2010 by Stanford classmates Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown, was among the first to apply augmented filters to fast, fleeting photo and video messages. It is believed that there are 363 million unique users on the network every day.
The company, valued at $24 billion when it went public in 2017, has seen profits decline this year. Spiegel laid off more than 1,200 people in August, roughly 20% of Snap’s entire staff. The company’s net loss increased by 400% to $360 million, as the earnings report released last week, making it the company’s weakest quarterly growth ever. The share price fell by 25% on Thursday to $7.38. On Monday, it dropped back down to about $8.30 from its earlier high.
The 2017 Howard Street location opened with many staff. Business Insider was the first to reveal the story. A Snap representative said the office “was used consistently by only a few team members following our switch to flexible work.” Also, they mentioned that the company’s Palo Alto headquarters are still operational.
The shutdown is a setback for an economy already suffering from the loss of commercial buildings during the outbreak. According to a recent report, the number of available office spaces in San Francisco has reached 27.1 million square feet.
