Scaling From 20 to 100+ Employees: How to Move Offices Without Losing Momentum

Quick answer

A growth-stage office move is three projects at once: a new-space buildout, the physical relocation, and restoring the old space to satisfy your lease. Companies that plan all three together, starting roughly eight to ten weeks out, typically move over a weekend with little lost productivity. Companies that treat lease-end restoration as cleanup usually discover it as an unbudgeted invoice months later.

Key takeaways

• The old lease is not finished when you leave. Most commercial leases include a restoration or surrender clause that can require removing walls, cabling, and improvements you installed.
• Pull the restoration clause before you sign the new lease, not in your final month. Any waiver a landlord offers has to be in writing.
• Budget restoration as its own line item with its own vendor and timeline, separate from the move.
• Move the physical office overnight or across a weekend, and treat IT and server relocation as a separate workstream with its own cutover plan.
• The furniture and equipment you leave behind is an asset, not a disposal problem. Liquidation partnerships and redeployment to other companies can offset part of the move cost.
• Bay Area availability is uneven right now: plentiful commodity space, tight competition for quality space. That affects how early you need to commit.

Why do growth-stage office moves go wrong?

They go wrong because one move is treated as one project. In practice, a company going from roughly 20 employees to 100 or more is running three at the same time, each with a different vendor, budget, and deadline: the buildout of the new space, the relocation itself, and the restoration of the space being vacated. When these are planned in sequence rather than in parallel, the restoration work is discovered last and costs the most.

The scale of expansion behind these moves is real. According to CBRE, tech and AI companies leased more than 14 million square feet across San Francisco and Silicon Valley combined in 2025, accounting for 55 percent of total leasing activity in those two markets, with more than five million square feet of additional tenant demand still active. Fit-out costs are rising alongside that demand: Cushman and Wakefield’s 2026 Americas Office Fit Out Cost Guide puts the average at 149 dollars per square foot, up 5.5 percent year over year, with 79 percent of contractors expecting further increases.

Valley Relocation and Storage has managed commercial relocations for Bay Area, Silicon Valley, and Sacramento companies since 1985, from locations in Concord, Benicia, Milpitas, and Sacramento. Supporting startups as they grow is an area that we have deep experience with. We have served hundreds of companies as they grow and their space needs change. Some of the most notable companies include X (formerly Twitter), Coupa, & Medallia.

What is a lease restoration clause, and what can it cost?

A restoration clause, sometimes called a surrender or make-good clause, obligates a tenant to return the space to a defined condition at the end of the lease. The obligation ranges from “broom clean and vacant” to full base-building restoration, meaning the removal of improvements the tenant installed. It is a standard provision, and it applies whether or not your company built out the space originally.

Depending on the language, restoration can require:

• Removing built walls, glass partitions, and other non-structural improvements
• Pulling out cabling, server racks, and network and phone wiring
• Restoring flooring, paint, ceilings, and lighting to original condition
• Demolishing kitchenette, breakroom, or bathroom improvements added during the tenancy
• Removing all furniture, fixtures, and equipment, and disposing of the debris

The exposure is the part most companies underestimate. Decommissioning and restoration are generally priced by volume, labor, and building access rather than by a flat rate per square foot, so a heavily built-out space with private offices, glass, and structured cabling can cost many times what an open-plan space with minimal alterations costs. In our experience we have seen costs to restore spaces to move in status can range from $1k to over $200k depending on the size of the space and the amount of restoration that needs to be done.

What should a CFO confirm before the move-out date?

Four checks, in order, well before the lease ends:

1. Pull the exact restoration language now. Confirm whether the obligation is broom clean or full base-building restoration. This determines the size of the budget line and should ideally be checked before signing the next lease, since the same clause will appear there.
2. Get any waiver in writing. Landlords will sometimes waive restoration on improvements that benefit the next tenant. Verbal assurances do not hold up at move-out.
3. Separate your property from leasehold improvements. Workstations, IT equipment, and furniture your company owns are relocated or resold. Only improvements attached to the space are typically subject to restoration.
4. Budget restoration as its own line item. A distinct scope, timeline, and vendor keeps it from competing for resources with the new-office setup and from arriving as a surprise invoice.

This article is general information, not legal advice. Restoration obligations depend on the specific language of your lease. Have your counsel or tenant representative review the clause.

How do you move an office without losing productivity?

By moving when the company is not working and by sequencing the return to service. For a team of this size, that generally means an overnight or weekend execution, with departments phased if the move spans multiple days. The measure that matters is not how fast the trucks are loaded, it is the gap between the last productive hour in the old space and the first productive hour in the new one.

Four practices close that gap:

• A single point of contact managing the project end to end, rather than a rotating set of dispatchers and crews.
• A published schedule shared with department heads at least three weeks out, so hiring managers can plan onboarding and interviews around it.
• IT and server relocation run as its own workstream, coordinated with your IT team’s cutover plan. Past roughly 50 to 75 employees, most companies have racks, network gear, or at minimum a wiring closet that needs static-controlled handling and a documented reconnection sequence.
• Labeling, inventory, and furniture setup completed before staff arrive. The hidden cost of a disorganized move is the week employees spend looking for monitor cables and file boxes, which never appears in the project plan.

Who handles which part of a growth-stage move?

What happens to the furniture and equipment you are not taking?

Most companies scaling out of a first or second office leave assets behind, and the default assumption is that those assets are a disposal cost. They usually are not. Valley treats what stays as a recovery opportunity, through three paths:

• Liquidation. Valley maintains partnerships with liquidators covering both office furniture and lab equipment, with the goal of maximizing the return on assets you are not moving rather than simply hauling them away.
• Redeployment to another company. Valley regularly places furniture and equipment from one customer directly with another customer who needs it. The company leaving recovers value and avoids disposal costs. The company arriving gets quality used assets at a fraction of new cost. Given how many growth-stage companies Valley moves in a given year, this happens more often than most clients expect.
• Donation and recycling. Assets with no resale or redeployment path are donated or recycled, with documentation for your finance and sustainability teams.

The practical benefit is that the exit line item in your move budget is rarely a pure cost. Recovery on furniture and equipment can offset a meaningful share of the teardown and restoration work, and the assets that leave through resale or redeployment are assets you are not paying to transport, store, or dispose of.

Sensitive materials follow a separate, documented path. Certificates of destruction are supplied on all sensitive materials, including hard drives, which are drilled and destroyed to ensure complete destruction rather than wiped or resold.

What does the timeline look like?

Decommissioning specialists generally advise starting the exit workstream around 90 days before the lease ends, noting that 60 days is workable and 30 days means paying a premium for speed. If your lease end and your move-in date are close together, the restoration schedule, not the move, is usually the binding constraint.

How does the current Bay Area market affect timing?

Availability is uneven rather than uniformly tight or loose, which matters for how early you commit. As of the second quarter of 2026, San Francisco’s overall office vacancy sat between roughly 27 and 30 percent depending on the brokerage measuring it, down sharply from its 2024 peak. Silicon Valley was far tighter at roughly 14 to 16 percent, and the Peninsula fell in between at about 24 percent.

The headline vacancy numbers understate competition for the space growth-stage companies actually want. Demand is concentrated in high-quality, close to move-in-ready buildings, while older inventory carries most of the vacancy. Practically, that means a funded company looking for quality space in Silicon Valley or a trophy building in San Francisco should expect a competitive process and should begin move planning earlier than the vacancy rate alone would suggest.

Frequently asked questions

Plan the move alongside the exit

Valley Relocation and Storage provides free on-site surveys for commercial projects. The survey covers both spaces: what moves, what stays, what has to come out of the old office, what can be resold or redeployed, and how the two schedules fit together.

Sources

• CBRE, AI Boom Drives Office Leasing Surge in San Francisco Bay Area
• Cushman & Wakefield, 2026 Americas Office Fit Out Cost Guide (summary)
• Kidder Mathews, San Francisco Office Market Report, Q2 2026
• Cushman & Wakefield, San Francisco Office MarketBeat, Q2 2026
• Kidder Mathews, Silicon Valley Office Market Report, Q2 2026
• Kidder Mathews, Peninsula/San Mateo Office Market Report, Q2 2026
• National Law Review, The Restoration Clause: Ticking Time Bomb in Your Office Lease?
• LeaseRef, How Office Decommissioning Works and What It Costs
• RESEAT, Office decommissioning in San Francisco: what it costs and what it recovers