Toast plans to vacate its Fenway headquarters, looks for new space

The restaurant technology company will pay $16 million to get out of its lease in a Fenway office building more than five years ahead of schedule.

Restaurant tech firm Toast said Monday it will move out of its headquarters office at 401 Park, in the Fenway, by the end of 2024.Handout

Restaurant technology company Toast is planning to leave its headquarters in the Fenway office building where it has been based for the past seven years.

The company is terminating its lease on most of its office space — more than 110,000 square feet at 401 Park Drive — at the end of June, Toast said on Monday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company will leave an additional 22,000 square foot space in the building at the end of 2024. Toast will pay its landlord — Alexandria Real Estate Equities — $16 million in return for ending the lease, which was to run until 2029.

In a statement to the Globe, Toast said it was looking for new office space in the area. “We’re currently in the process of identifying our new location,” a spokeswoman for the company said in an e-mail. “As you can imagine, Toasters have lots of opinions about where we should go.”

Toast moved to 401 Park — a massive art deco Sears building that has been converted to office and retail space — in 2015, and expanded its office footprint in the building four times before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. But since 2019, it has been scaling back its presence. Toast employed 4,500 people worldwide at the end of 2022.

Shares of Toast, which will report first-quarter earnings on Tuesday, climbed 5 percent on Monday after the lease termination filing. The shares have gained 7 percent so far this year.

Toast is the latest company to downsize in Boston’s office market, which is enduring its highest vacancy rate in two decades. Several tech companies, in particular, have pared back space requirements amid a widespread shift toward more hybrid and remote work, while new leasing has slowed sharply from prepandemic levels.

Alexandria, meanwhile, has been rapidly growing its footprint in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood. The California-based life-science real estate development firm bought 401 Park in early 2021 for more than $1.5 billion in a bid to convert the building into lab-ready space. That deal kept Boston-based development firm Samuels & Associates on as a minority owner and manager of the property.

Alexandria and Samuels are also building a lab at 421 Park, the former Bed Bath & Beyond location situated between 401 Park and the MBTA Green Line Fenway station. That lab will eventually be home to a new Star Market grocery store. Samuels is also proposing to convert the site of the existing Star Market at 1400 Boylston St. into a lab — a project that’s in part subsidizing a proposed 115-unit housing development behind the Trinity Orthodox Cathedral nearby.

Spokespeople for Alexandria and Samuels did not respond to requests for comment.

This story was updated on May 9 with a statement from Toast.