Job search company Indeed has been trying to fill its full-building lease at the Domain Gateway office building for more than two years, and it finally found a subtenant.
ByteDance, the Beijing-based parent company of TikTok, subleased a 108,000-square-foot chunk of Indeed’s full-building lease at the property at 2900 Esperanza Crossing during the fourth quarter, Partners Real Estate’s senior VP of research Steve Triolet confirmed. California-based KBS owns the 2009-built property, and Savills had the listing.
The deal appears to be an expansion for ByteDance, which leased 125,000 square feet of the 32-story 300 Colorado Street in Downtown Austin in early 2022, Chron reported at the time. It later offered the space up on the sublease market and then relented, pulling the listing a few months later. State filings show ByteDance switched gears and planned a $29 million renovation of the space, a three-phased project that was slated to be completed in early 2025.
TikTok’s Austin office space saga coincided with the federal government’s ongoing attempts to ban the social media platform. After President Donald Trump ordered ByteDance to divest from the app in his first term, the Biden administration reversed the order. Then Congress passed a law that set a deadline for ByteDance to sell the app. Trump started his second term with an extension; the parties reached a deal in the fall to spin off the app’s U.S. operations to a group controlled by investors, including Larry Ellison’s Oracle.
Indeed, on the other hand, is a victim of the rapid boom and bust of tech in Austin that took place between 2020 and 2023. The company was saddled with nearly 800,000 square feet of Austin office space spread across three high-profile buildings, chunks of which have been languishing on the sublease market since the summer of 2023.
Even so, tech is expected to play a major role in the Austin office market in 2026, JLL said in its fourth-quarter report.
Tech companies accounted for the three largest leases of the quarter, which posted a positive office absorption of 23,700 square feet. VMware renewed its lease for nearly 135,000 square feet at River Place; TikTok’s sublease at Domain Gateway ranked second; and Nvidia renewed its 79,000-square-foot lease at The Crossing at Lakeline.
Tech companies make up nearly a third of tenants for pre-leased projects in the pipeline, according to JLL.
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