Need Office Space? Pixar Has An Extra Building They’ll Let You Lease
California’s animation landscape is changing, and the latest major shakeup sees Pixar trying to lease 16,800 square feet of newly renovated office space in Emeryville, across the street from its main campus.
In spring of 2022, Pixar began renting a 12,800-square-foot office space at 1201 Park Avenue, and in December 2022, the company applied to make improvements to the facilities which, according to the San Francisco Business Times, included demolishing non-load-bearing walls, improving infrastructure for power, data, and lighting, and building new offices.
The company invested $3.6 million in the renovations, which increased the size of the offices to 16,800 square feet. But no employees from Pixar ever moved into the space.
In June of this year, Pixar laid off around 75 workers, the biggest round of layoffs at the studio in more than a decade, and the following month, the company made its new office space available for subleasing.
The listing coincides with larger cuts made by Pixar’s parent company Disney across its businesses this year, as CEO Bob Iger looks to eliminate $5.5 billion in costs. Real estate agency CBRE is handling the leasing of the brick and timber building. Pictures and floorplans can be found on the company’s website.
According to the agency, the two-story site is available for immediate occupancy and includes open collaborative space on both floors, an open-air entrance with high ceilings, a roll-up door for easy access, and an enclosed atrium with high ceilings.
Pixar’s main headquarters were relocated from Richmond to Emeryville in 2000. There, the company currently operates a 430,000-square-foot campus with a swimming pool, soccer field, basketball court, and statues of the company’s most recognizable characters.
Pixar is hardly the only company looking to offload unwanted property in the Bay Area. Tech giants including Adobe, Dropbox, and Salesforce are all scaling down, and per the San Francisco Business Times, more than 1.3 million square feet of property was listed for subleasing in the third quarter of this year. That was the highest total since the beginning of the pandemic.
Other major changes to the California animation scene this year include Warner Bros. Discovery shutting down the iconic Cartoon Network Studios in Burbank and Skydance Animation launching a 5.8-acre facility in Santa Monica.
