Office landlords in Clerkenwell, EC1, have struck gold – or silicon – as a growing number of tech companies queue up to take space in the area for their UK headquarters.
Social media giants Snapchat and TikTok both plan major new offices in the neighbourhood, while fast-growing online clothing marketplace Depop is on the cusp of cementing a move nearby.
Snapchat is in talks to set up a 114,000 sq ft base at HB Reavis’ landmark new office building, Bloom, EC1. The deal would be a big upsizing from its current base at 77 Shaftesbury Avenue, W1, where it is believed to have re-geared its lease to enable the move.
Video-sharing company TikTok hopes to follow up its 15-year leasing deal at Helical’s Kaleidoscope building on Farringdon Road, announced in March, by taking another office nearby. The company is hunting for between 60,000 sq ft and 100,000 sq ft and is carrying out viewings to find premises as close to its new office as possible.
The interest follows news that Depop will take 30,000 sq ft at 20 Farringdon Road, EC1. That deal is understood to be nearing its close as soon as this week, and would mean the company’s new base will be roughly twice the size of its existing premises in Shoreditch.
Three rapidly expanding social media companies making Clerkenwell their home will be a boon for agents in the area, especially given the £86 per sq ft rent TikTok has agreed at Kaleidoscope. Prime rents in the area are usually around £75 per sq ft, according to JLL.
TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has grown during the pandemic, almost doubling in size in the past 18 months to more than 100,000 staff. Snap Inc, which owns Snapchat, recently revealed that its number of daily users has surged by more than a fifth since the Covid-19 outbreak began, to 280m. And the increase in demand for Depop’s platform has been so marked that it prompted US-based online sales giant Etsy to pay £1bn to buy it out earlier this month.
If all of the leasing deals go ahead, they would mark a significant increase in office take-up for the technology sector in central London. In the first quarter of this year, TMT occupiers made up just 17% of office leasing deals. That is down on 21.6% for the whole of last year. TMT take-up in central London was as high as one-third of all deals in 2013, a figure which has gradually fallen in subsequent years.
Andrew Barnes, director of central London tenant representation at Savills, said: “The western fringes of the City have been attractive to tech and media occupiers for some time, forming an ecosystem which has the gravitational pull to attract even more companies and offering the sometimes ‘quirkier’ offices that these tenants tend to like.
“These spaces in the past also tended to come at lower rents to those found in the City and West End, although that gap has almost disappeared in the last few years. The forthcoming opening of the Elizabeth Line too adds to the appeal of these locations, ticking a big box on connectivity and ease of commute for their staff.”
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