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The social media player has selected The Sorting Office in Dublin as a new location for its Irish operations.
Having announced a number of expansion plans for its Irish operations in the last year, TikTok has selected the location for its new Dublin office.
According to The Irish Times, the social video-sharing company has agreed terms to rent The Sorting Office in Dublin’s docklands on the basis of a 15-year lease.
The Sorting Office has more than 18,000 sq m of space and is located on the corner of Cardiff Lane and Hanover Street East. The building includes more than 1,000 sq m of ground-level retail space and has the capacity to hold up to 2,000 employees.
TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, started eying up Dublin for a major office location last summer. The new Dublin office is the latest in a long list expansions in TikTok’s Irish operations in the last year.
In June 2020, the company announced that its Dublin team would become responsible for privacy oversight of all European users. In August, it revealed that Ireland would be the location for its first data centre in Europe, which is expected to be operational by early 2022.
At the end of the year, the company said it planned to hire 200 people at its Dublin base, bringing its headcount in Ireland to more than 1,000.
And last month, the company announced plans to create a new European Transparency and Accountability Centre, which aims to give experts an opportunity to visit and see how TikTok teams go about their work.
TikTok’s selection of the former An Post sorting office follows Google’s decision not to lease the seven-storey building last September.
A Google spokesperson said at the time that the decision followed “much deliberation” but did not offer any further detail.
The mass move towards remote working over the past year has put the city centre office rental sector on shaky ground. Commercial real estate company CBRE reported that Q1 of 2021 was one of the lowest quarters on record in terms of office leasing activity in Dublin, with take-up only reaching 3,752 sq m.
However, the report predicted that there would be “a turning point for the Dublin office market” as there was a discernible increase in demand during the quarter, with almost 270,000 sq m of active requirements for accommodation.
