Meta Surrenders Lease At One London Building

Facebook owner Meta Platforms has reportedly scaled back its office real estate footprint in London, after surrendering a lease on a building.

Reuters reported that British Land, the largest property development firm in the UK, in a business update said that Meta had surrendered the lease of its building at 1 Triton Square, London, located between Euston Train Station and Regent’s Park.

Meta, like other tech giants such as Google, undertook a significant real estate expansion during the Covid-19 pandemic, despite nearly all staff working from home during that time.

London office

In June 2023 Meta informed its staff that they need to work from the company’s offices three days a week, starting September 2023.

That return to the office order came amid resistance by tech workers from a number of firms.

Now in a business update, British Land has said that Meta has surrendered surrendered one of the two buildings it had leased at London’s Regent’s Palace amid prevailing macroeconomic uncertainties.

“Meta’s surrender of our building at 1 Triton Square also enables us to accelerate our plans to reposition Regent’s Place as London’s premier Innovation and Life Sciences campus,” the property developer stated.

Year of efficiency

The scaling back of Meta’s real estate portfolio comes amid Meta’s efficiency drive after a tough 2022, where it contended with a post-pandemic slump in digital ads, coupled with heavy spending on the Metaverse that unsettled some investors.

Zuckerberg recognised this investor concern in February this year, after Meta posted a notable decline in profits, coupled with a third straight quarter revenue decline, which led him to promise investors that 2023 would be a “year of efficiency”.

As part of that Meta had already announced back in November 2022 that it was axing 13 percent of its employees, or roughly 11,000 jobs.

Then in March 2023 CEO Mark Zuckerberg informed staff that he had made the “difficult decision” to axe another 10,000 positions.

In April this year Meta began laying off technical staff.

Those staff being laid off had technical backgrounds such as user experience, software engineering, graphics programming and other roles.