As Wall Street frets over a slowdown, the social media giant’s expanding property empire suggests Mark Zuckerberg has few doubts about the future.
Since Facebook Inc. arrived in Menlo Park, California, seven years ago, the town has been overrun by construction cranes, orange safety cones and truckloads of building materials to transform a former industrial area into a sprawling campus that can support a $500 billion tech giant.
So big are the ambitions that the company plans to redevelop whole swaths of the land it holds in the Silicon Valley city, potentially doubling its workforce there over the next decade to 35,000 people—more than Menlo Park’s current population.
Even that won’t be enough for its expansion plans.
“We continue to grow,” John Tenanes, the company’s head of facilities, said in a conference room overlooking a salt marsh in Facebook’s newest Menlo Park office, a Frank Gehry-designed building called MPK 21 that opened last week. “We’re at a point where we needed more space, and this area couldn’t keep up.”
For all the turmoil surrounding Facebook and investor concerns about a slowdown, the company’s gone on a real estate binge that suggests that its optimism about its future knows no limits. Menlo Park is just the start. In the past year alone, the company has signed agreements that could vastly expand its footprint in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s been one of the most active leasers in the region’s already hot office market, spurring brokers and analysts to do math on just how it will fill so much space.
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