Finance History | 888 Brannan Street — A Battery Works Became a Marketplace for Spare Rooms

People treat Airbnb as an app that started in a rented apartment and never needed a building.

The headquarters that made the firm visible sits in this former factory.

In May 2012 Airbnb signed a ten-year lease for about 170,000 square feet at 888 Brannan Street, in Showplace Square. The company planned to move in February 2013.

The concrete warehouse went up in 1916 and 1917 for the National Carbon Company, which made Eveready batteries. A rail spur once ran through the volume that is now the atrium.

The building entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. It later held the Giftcenter and Jewelrymart. Wells Fargo took it in foreclosure. SKS Partners bought the empty floors in 2011 and rebuilt them as offices.

Airbnb was then fewer than five years old and still private. The lease was a bet that a marketplace for spare rooms would need a factory-sized floor in the city where the first guests had slept.

In 2015 a TIAA-CREF and Norges Bank joint venture paid 307 million dollars for the building. Airbnb later cut other San Francisco floors after 2020 and, in 2024, extended the 888 Brannan lease through 2037 for more than 250,000 square feet.

The pin is the public sidewalk at Eighth and Brannan. The atrium is tenant space. Do not enter.

The mechanism is a listing platform that turned other people's apartments into inventory, then rented a historic factory to house the people who wrote the software.

Photo: Dllu, 2016, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. 888 Brannan Street, San Francisco.