It’s official. Yelp will be closing offices in New York, Chicago and D.C. and shifting to a fully remote workforce CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman announced Thursday, according to GlobeSt.com.
The decision was made in response to an employee survey that found 86% would prefer to work remotely. And it isn’t just Yelp. This seems to be the trend more often than not, which doesn’t bode well for Chicago — especially on the heels of the out-of-state moves of Boeing, Caterpillar and Citadel.
Yelp has a 132,000-square-foot lease at Vornado Realty Trust’s theMart. The lease expires next year, and it was reported that the company put about 60,000 square feet of that space on the sublease market early last year.
In a blog post, Stoppelman said it became clear that the company didn’t need an office presence. Under-utilization of existing office space was the most telling signal.
The company started reopening offices in September 2021 but chose not to set a “return to work” date, instead piloting a “remote-first approach” to give people an option to use an office if they wanted to do so. The resulting stats? Interesting, but not wholly surprising.
Weekly office utilization in the New York, Chicago and D.C. offices averaged less than 2%. Globally, 99% of company employees are choosing to work remotely.
