Google has bought a campus located on the West Side in Manhattan that supports 12,000 employees in the city. This Tuesday, the tech giant announced that it would spend $2.1 billion to buy the office in front of the Hudson River waterfront. This is one of the largest prices in recent years for an office building in the US.
While some businesses are reducing their office space due to remote work, others continue expanding. One of the industries that struggled the most because of remote work was real estate. And although remote work is ‘’here to stay’’, onsite work is part of the working panorama, especially for many big technology companies like Apple and Google.
Google Will Continue Encouraging Onsite Work
While Manhattan has many office spaces available for lease, major tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook are expanding their offices. Google was already leasing the 1.3 million-square-foot property; however, it was not occupated because of the pandemic. Now, the building is being renovated and expanded to support 12,000 employees in New York City.
These past months Google had many controversies regarding remote work. The company was planning to have all employees working back at the office. However, the staff wasn’t excited about the idea and sent a couple of emails to the CEO and the directives to negotiate work-from-home arrangements. The company now supports remote work to some extent, but it’s still looking forward to returning to the office in 2022.
The tech giant announced that it is planning to hire another 2,000 workers in New York in the upcoming years, and it’s still supporting an onsite collaborative environment. Ruth Portal, CFO at Google, said:
New York’s energy, creativity, and world-class talent are what keeps us rooted here and why we’re deepening our commitment with plans to purchase St. John’s Terminal. We look forward to continuing to grow along with this remarkable, diverse city.
Originally the company expected to have employees back at the office this year, but because of the highly contagious Delta variant, they postponed its return to early 2022.
