By Peter Lawrence Kane
Google is certainly on an expansionary blitz. Inside Bay Area reported that even though it hasn’t maxed out the space it already occupies, Google is purchasing one humongous building after another, across the entire Bay Area. All told, it’s enough for 30,000 new Googlers, which would be a greater-than-50-percent increase over the current worldwide head count. The scale is unprecedented in an already hot market, leading one commercial broker to call them “the granddaddy of 800-pound gorillas.” (For all its turmoil, Twitter is still growing, too, although its workforce of 3,300 is much smaller.)
If you were looking for hard numbers to back up what is anecdotally obvious, the Bay Area is just about to hit its all-time high jobs figures. There were 3.57 million payroll jobs in September, which means we’ve either broken or are about to break the previous record of 3.61 million (set way back when Bill Clinton was exiting the White House, in January 2001.)
Since early 2010, almost 450,000 more people around these parts are cashing steady paychecks. If nothing else, this puts a little bit of damper on the “are we in a bubble?” speculation. Since Instagram famously had only 13 employees when Facebook bought them, these numbers reveal a broader-based trend. And these people all have to work somewhere. As Mountain View has literally run out of land, it makes me wonder if one of the two tech titans that’s looking at the Sears building in Uptown Oakland might be Google. In the end, regardless of who takes the Sears Building, hopefully the fact that BART is right there means they won’t be relying exclusively on shuttle buses.
[Via Inside Bay Area; photo by Duane Storey via Flickr]
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