Uber purchases former Sears building Uptown Station in Oakland, plans to use top 6 floors to house 2-3K employees, move in during 2017
NBC Bay Area :
Context & Ripple Effects
This purchase confirms what leaked a day earlier — that Uber was taking likely all 330K square feet of the former Sears building in Oakland's Uptown Station — and escalates it from a lease to an outright buy, with 2,000–3,000 employees slated for the top six floors and a 2017 move-in. It sits alongside the design concept Uber unveiled months earlier for a separate 420K square-foot headquarters in San Francisco, making clear the company planned capacity on both sides of the bay.
First-order effects
- Oakland gains a marquee tech employer committing thousands of workers to a building that has sat vacant since Sears left, converting dead retail stock into Class-A office overnight.
- Uber shifts from tenant to owner, trading lease optionality for balance-sheet control of its East Bay footprint at the peak of its expansion phase.
Second-order effects
- East Bay landlords gain leverage as San Francisco supply tightens — notably after Twitter backed out of its 100K square-foot expansion at 1455 Market Street, where both Square and Uber are headquartered, leaving displaced demand looking across the bay.
Third-order effects
- The full arc in related coverage cuts both ways: Uber abandoned the Oakland plan in 2017 to cut costs and sold the building to CIM Group, which then leased all of Uptown Station to Square — evidence that buying entire buildings against headcount forecasts turns hiring volatility into real-estate liability, and that Oakland's tech tenancy survives even when any single company's bet fails.
The trend: San Francisco's overheated office market is pushing large tech employers into whole-building acquisitions in Oakland, with each commitment sized to hiring plans that can reverse faster than the real estate can be unwound.