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Tech giant eBay is searching for a new home for its more than 1,000 employees and hundreds of contractors in Utah after listing its regional headquarters in Draper for sale.
The company opened its Utah offices to much fanfare in 2013, saying at the time it would bring thousands of jobs to the 240,000-square-foot building at 583 W. Ebay Way.
eBay initially tapped Colliers broker Brandon Fugal to lease out unused space within the building but has decided to sell the 36-acre campus and relocate to a new building.
“We’ve been marketing over 100,000 square feet for a lease,” Fugal, chairman of Colliers International – Utah, told Building Salt Lake. “But we’ve now received authorization to put it on the market for sale.”
The property is unique in that, unlike much of the regional headquarters that make up the Silicon Slopes tech cluster, eBay’s campus is one of the few that is steps away from a FrontRunner transit station.
“Being a true transit-oriented development campus differentiates it from everything else in the market,” Fugal said. “The plug and play turnkey nature of the campus with its extraordinary amenity space including 400-seat auditorium, full cafeteria, fitness facility and outdoor amenity areas, makes it ideal for recruitment and retention.”
The two-building campus included one for employees and another for the copious amenities the company offered to its employees, according to a post by the website sltrib.com at the time.
The company received a $38.2 million tax break from the Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) as part of its expansion as long as it expanded its physical and employee footprint through 2031, the website reported in 2011.
That program is reviewed annually, and recipients only receive tax refunds after meeting certain metrics. The company has received between 0 percent and 25 percent in the past 13 years, according to the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity.
Utah’s tech industry hasn’t been immune from the shake-ups caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the high interest rate environment. eBay laid off 9 percent of its global workforce in January, though it’s not clear how many of those 1,000 employees were in Utah.
Those layoffs, paired with the rise in remote work, likely drastically decreased the company’s need for its existing building. Many of eBay’s employees in Utah work remotely for most of the week.
The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the size of its workforce in the state, though it is likely lower than it was when the company built the campus.
“They have over 500 personnel in this market. They’re not laying any of them off,” Fugal said. “They will continue to maintain their over 500 strong workforce in the Utah market. They’re just simply going to right-size and transition to space that is more appropriate for their current size and footprint.”
As for where it’s heading, Fugal said Colliers is representing eBay on its next move, and that the company would likely stay in the southern portion of the Salt Lake Valley near the cluster of Silicon Slopes businesses.
“They’re gonna focus on staying in the south valley area with access to both Utah County and Salt Lake County,” Fugal said. “We are representing them in that long-term evaluation as well.”
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