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Highlights
- Google Inc (Nasdaq:GOOGL) plans to buy an office space in Manhattan, New York worth US$2.1 billion in one of the priciest deals in US history.
- However, most Google employees currently work from home.
- The company’s New York workforce rose from 7000 employees in 2018 to 12,000 staff currently.
Technology giant Google Inc (Nasdaq:GOOGL) plans to buy a new swanky office building in Manhattan, New York, for US$2.1 billion in one of the priciest deals in US history.
It is also one of the most expensive sales of a single building since the beginning of the pandemic, according to data company Real Capital Analytics. The building is expected to be open for work from mid-2023.
The deal shows that major tech companies are keen to buy office spaces although most of their workforce currently operate from remote locations, Wall Street Journal reported. The Manhattan property spreads across a 1.3-million-square-feet area.
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Google adopted the work-from-home strategy more aggressively than other companies. However, it does not intend to ask employees to come to the office until January 2022, as per Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc.
Google plans to keep both work-from-home and office options open for employees. But the latest investment is part of its long-term strategy.
The company, however, said that if people work together, they can be more productive, hence the need for a spacious office.
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Source: Pixabay.
Google’s workforce
The company’s New York workforce rose from 7000 employees in 2018 to 12,000 staff currently. “We prefer to buy office spaces so that we can change them as our needs in the future like arranging office floors,” said William Floyd, Google’s director of public policy and government affairs.
The real estate firm Oxford Properties Group and pension fund manager CPP Investments, both Canadian companies, own the Manhattan building.
Tech companies like Facebook (Nasdaq:FB) and Amazon.com Inc (Nasdaq:AMZN) have rented or purchased office spaces across the US in recent years. The companies are spending millions of dollars to buy office spaces as real estate prices are currently low.
Tech companies’ hunger for real estate is proving helpful for the economy as many financial firms, like HSBC Bank, have slowed down on real estate purchases. The tech companies’ shopping spree has also increased the real estate prices in cities. Rent and property tax revenues have also gone up due to highly paid employees.
