Meta has paid £149 million to surrender the lease on one of two buildings at London's Regent's Place which it never moved into.

Property leaser British Land said it had received the notification of the surrender of 1 Triton Place on 25 September and that it would result in post interest savings of 0.6p for its half year financial period ended 30 September.

British Land said that as a result of the Meta surrender and the disposal of the office and datacentre portfolio, March 2023 loan-to-value (LTV) of 36 per cent on a pro-forma basis would be 33.6 per cent.

“We are comfortable with current market expectations for FY24 due to better collection of historic Covid arrears than anticipated,” it added.

The decision may have come in a bid to slash costs, with Meta’s virtual reality arm having recently recorded losses of over $7 billion across the first six months of 2023.

The social media company was also hit with a record €1.2 billion fine in May by the Irish Data Protection Commission after failing to take note of a top EU court’s warnings around protecting users’ data from US security services.

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