Square says it has leased all of the office space in Oakland's Uptown Station, which Uber sold to developer CIM Group in 2017, with room for up to 2,000 staff
Roland Li / San Francisco Chronicle : Tweets: @rolandlisf , @sfchronicle , and @kimmaicutler Tweets: Roland Li / @rolandlisf : Square leases all the office space in Oakland's Uptown Station (formerly Uber's building) in one of the biggest deals in city history. http://www.sfchronicle.com/... Square poised to become Oakland's largest tech company with space for 2,000 employees. The end of a four-year saga? @sfchronicle : Exclusive: Payments processor @Square signed an office lease Thursday for Oakland's Uptown Station in one of the city's biggest real estate deals ever. http://www.sfchronicle.com/... Kim-Mai Cutler / @kimmaicutler : Wow, Square is coming to Oakland. Same building Uber was originally going to expand to and then later sold. Square said the decision predated Prop. C. http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Uptown Station has come full circle since Uber bought the former Sears building in 2015 with plans for thousands of employees: the company abandoned its Oakland headquarters plans in 2017 to cut costs and sold to CIM Group, leaving the developer holding an empty flagship. Square's lease closes that loop, filling the entire office component with room for up to 2,000 staff.
The deal also fits a pattern of tech tenants taking whole buildings rather than floors — Facebook leased all 43 floors of Park Tower at Transbay earlier this year (its full-building Transbay lease) — and it lands just three years after Twitter backed out of a 100K-square-foot Market Street expansion, a reminder of how quickly these commitments swing both ways.
First-order effects
- Square becomes positioned as Oakland's largest tech company on day one, gaining room for up to 2,000 employees in a single transaction described as one of the biggest real estate deals in city history.
- CIM Group converts a building it bought from a retreating Uber into a fully leased asset, resolving the vacancy left by Uber's 2017 exit.
Second-order effects
- Oakland gains a marquee payments-company anchor where Uber's retreat had made the Uptown corridor look overbuilt, strengthening the city's pitch to San Francisco tenants weighing cross-bay moves.
- Whole-building leases by Square and Facebook tighten the Bay Area market for large contiguous blocks, pushing mid-size tenants toward smaller footprints or secondary locations.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the Bay Area's office map stratifies into whole-building campuses for large tech balance sheets and fragmented space for everyone else, with Oakland absorbing overflow demand from San Francisco.
- The Uber-to-Square handoff shows how quickly corporate real estate commitments reverse — a structural risk for developers like CIM Group who buy buildings anchored to a single tenant's growth plan.
The trend: Bay Area tech expansion is shifting from San Francisco-only towers toward whole-building leases that spill across the bay into Oakland, even as individual tenants' plans prove reversible.