Ask Jeeves moves to Oakland

December 10, 2004

Ask Jeeves will move to downtown Oakland, which has struggled for years to draw major new businesses.

The Emeryville company, known for the old-fashioned butler on its ask.com search page, signed an 8 1/2 year lease to move 170 employees to the 555 City Center building on Dec. 1.

"Our move to the City Center offers financial benefits and a great location for attracting top Bay Area talent," said CEO Steve Berkowitz. "It came down to the convenience of mass transit and a good deal with a good landlord."

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The company's announcement shows a possible resurgence in the high-tech sector and is a big boost for Oakland's downtown.

"This is a great shot in the arm for Oakland,'' Mayor Jerry Brown said Tuesday. "It's exciting to see that Ask Jeeves has rebounded and that they want to locate in Oakland. It's an exciting, nationally known firm -- with an intellectually stimulating product -- that will call Oakland home."

The move comes nearly four years after Ask Jeeves announced plans to become the anchor tenant in the same Oakland high-rise and leave its current headquarters near the Emeryville train station.

In early 2000, the heyday of the dot-com economic bubble, Ask Jeeves signed a 10-year, $80 million lease to occupy a third of the 487,000 square feet in the 20-story City Center building, which was Oakland's first nongovernment high-rise being built in a decade.

But just as the high-rise was being finished, the bubble burst. Ask Jeeves lost $189 million and cut its workforce by nearly half. In 2001, Ask Jeeves decided to stay in Emeryville and paid City Center's owner, Shorenstein Realty, $16 million to get out of the lease.

Beyond the immediate economic woes, the lease cancellation was a big blow to Brown's efforts to attract new business to downtown Oakland. It also left the City Center building at only 3 percent capacity.

Shorenstein bought the site, then an empty hole in the ground deserted by a previous developer, from the city for $2.8 million. City Center's May 2000 groundbreaking, along the new office towers owned by the state of California and the federal government, was hailed at the time as a sign that Oakland development had finally turned a corner.

Since opening in 2001 -- the recession's nadir -- the City Center building has gradually filled up. With the belated addition of Ask Jeeves, the high-rise will be 87 percent leased.

"We're extremely pleased that Ask Jeeves is making the move to Oakland City Center," says John Dolby, vice president of leasing for Shorenstein Realty. "This location will give Ask Jeeves' employees easy access to freeways and public transportation. It also provides the convenience of dining, shopping and even living in downtown Oakland."

Ask Jeeves has leased 55,803 square feet and will occupy the fourth and fifth floors, along with the plaza level.

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Ask Jeeves, founded in 1996 and launched in 1997, is an Internet search engine that competes against Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN. It makes most of its money from advertising that appears on its Web sites.

Ask Jeeves expects to have $255 million in revenue in 2004 and a profit of $66 million, Berkowitz said Tuesday. In May, the company doubled its market share of Internet searches to nearly 7 percent by acquiring Interactive Search Holdings, a company that owned Excite.com, Iwon.com and MyWay.com sites.

"This is about the rebirth of a company,'' said Berkowitz, who joined Ask Jeeves in May 2001. "We went from the peak of the dot-com bubble to the bottom of the trough in terms of despair. I hope this story, this rebirth, bodes well for not just for Oakland but for Emeryville, San Francisco and the whole Bay Area."

Source: SF Gate

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