Source: Uber leasing space in former Sears building in Oakland, likely all 330K square feet, for an office that will open in two years
Exclusive: Uber shakes up real estate market with massive lease in Oakland's former Sears building — Uber Technologies Inc. will open a large office in Oakland …
Context & Ripple Effects
Uber's move on Oakland caps a busy real-estate stretch: two months after unveiling a 420,000-square-foot San Francisco headquarters design, the company is now taking likely all 330,000 square feet of the former Sears building, its second major office commitment in one year. The deal converts a long-vacant department-store landmark into space for what related reporting says will house 2,000-3,000 employees once the building purchase closes out.
It matters because Uber becomes the largest tech anchor yet in Uptown Oakland, a market that had been waiting for a tenant of this scale to validate it as more than overflow from San Francisco.
First-order effects
- Uber immediately locks up essentially the entire available floor plate of Uptown Station, removing the area's largest block of Class-A office space from the market and setting its own opening timeline at roughly two years out.
- Oakland gains a marquee tenant whose 2,000-3,000 planned headcount gives landlords and brokers in the corridor their first proof point for pricing large-format leases.
Second-order effects
- Nearby Uptown landlords can now benchmark against Uber's full-building commitment, tightening negotiating leverage on every subsequent Oakland lease and pushing some tenants toward secondary submarkets or earlier renewals.
- Rival Bay Area tech employers weighing expansion face a choice between following Uber east — bidding up Oakland — or paying up in San Francisco, where Uber has already committed to its own headquarters build-out.
Third-order effects
- The fuller arc shows how these commitments unwind: Uber abandoned the Oakland headquarters plan in 2017 to cut costs, sold the building to developer CIM Group, and Square subsequently leased the entire office space — evidence that mega-leases by growth-stage tech companies are tradeable assets whose occupancy can flip between tenants faster than the buildings themselves change.
- If that pattern holds, Oakland's emergence as a tech office market depends less on any single anchor than on developers like CIM recycling vacated corporate commitments to the next wave of tenants.
The trend: Bay Area tech companies are spreading beyond San Francisco into Oakland with whole-building commitments that double as speculative real-estate bets, which cost-cutting cycles can force them to hand off to the next tenant.