Slack, the workplace messaging tool that allows one never to have to physically be in the workplace but also allows one to never actually stop working, is giving up its physical workplace in SoMa.

A little over a year after being acquired for $27.7 billion by across-the-street neighbor Salesforce, Slack has decided to offload the 205,000 square feet of office space that it leased less than three year ago in downtown SF. The offices at 45 Fremont have been listed for sublease, as the SF Business Times reports, and this adds to the 7.5 million square feet of office space in SF already on the sublease market as of December.

When Slack took the space at 45 Fremont in 2019, becoming the biggest tenant in the building, it was one of the biggest leases signed that year. The biggest lease of 2019 was Pinterest's deal for 490,000 square feet at 88 Bluxome — a deal that Pinterest backed out of in August 2020, five months into the pandemic, at a cost of $89.5 million.

Slack's decision to sublet all of its office space at 45 Fremont adds to the growing trend in downsizing of physical offices for many SF companies, thanks to the pandemic trend of remote work. (Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield himself told the Washington Post in December that forcing workers back to the office is a "doomed approach," and in a pullquote that is self-serving when it comes to the role of Slack's software, he said, "Work is no longer a place you go. It’s something you do.") Though not all companies plan to be quite so remote in the coming months and years.

LVMH-owned Sephora raised some hopes for commercial real estate agents — and downtown business that cater to office workers — when it signed a lease a few weeks ago to take over 286,000 square feet of offices at 350 Mission Street which is being subleased by Salesforce. Saleforce still may occupy a few floors of that building, after previously occupying all 30 floors — though it also subleased three floors to Yelp, which announced in September that it is consolidating its headquarters there.

Yelp previously, in February 2021, put 14 floors of its former headquarters up for lease at 140 New Montgomery. Some of that space has since been taken by AI firm Datarobot.