San Francisco’s furniture graveyard has some of the city’s best deals

Fake plants and dismembered webcams. Conference tables and deadstock printers. $2,000 telescopes and rows upon rows of that same knockoff Eames chair. These are just a few items that can be found at Remoov’s crowded 17th Street warehouse in San Francisco, which has become a graveyard for Silicon Valley’s corporate furniture. 

Ever since the pandemic struck, the company — which mostly turns a profit by gutting and reselling fixtures from shuttered offices — has cleared out scores of commercial spaces in the Financial District and SoMa, and management says that their secondhand business has become an unlikely barometer for the city’s shifting commercial real estate market. 

Remoov was founded by Luis Perez, who developed the idea for the company when he noticed that his friends from Stanford had nowhere to dump their furniture every time they moved. Though the company has been around since 2014, business didn’t take off until 2020, right when COVID-19 took hold of the Bay Area and companies started going remote.

“We started selling a ton of standing desks,” says Soran Mofti, head of operations at Remoov. “We’ve probably sold three, four hundred in the past two, three years if not more.” 

Once tech workers ditched their state-of-the-art offices, companies panicked when they realized that they suddenly needed to clear out their beer pong and foosball tables, along with their kombucha mini fridges, plastic palm fronds and fake Lichtenstein wall art. Now, many of these corporate relics can be found on Remoov’s showroom floor for a fraction of their retail value — and shockingly, most of them have found new life, especially among San Francisco’s teachers and artists who previously couldn’t afford them. 

Most of this inventory came from the Financial District, but Mofti says that Remoov has liquidated furniture in some of the city’s wealthiest enclaves, like the Marina, Pacific Heights and Russian Hill. Many of the residents in these neighborhoods have likely left the Bay Area entirely, he said, and didn’t want to take their furnishings with them. 

The way the process works is pretty straightforward: Clients will pay Remoov to clear out their space, and once everything is collected, it gets consigned at Remoov’s San Francisco warehouse, dubbed “The Local Flea,” on 17th Street. When a customer buys something, the company and the seller split the profits 50/50. 

Those that don’t want to travel to the Mission to shop can visit the company’s website and pay just $245 for a Herman Miller desk, as opposed to the original sticker price of $1,300. At one point, the company even liquidated a ridiculous amount of privacy booths — which can cost up to $5,000 — and resold them to independent musicians, Mofti said. 

He gestured to an enormous whiteboard which flunkies, duct tapers and task masters probably once used to help create “synergy” in frenzied all-hands meetings. It’s just one of many fixtures that have found new life in local teachers’ and tutors’ classrooms, he explains.

And while I may not exactly need a fine art print of a chillwave palm tree, it’s reassuring to know that these spoils are finally accessible to the public, including people like myself who are still struggling to survive the rapid gentrification of the Bay Area — a place that has yet to reckon with the lifelong impacts of the tech industry and its fabled “disruptors.” Though the future of this industry may be uncertain, for now, one thing can be assured: If you’re ever in the market for a steampunk dry bar, or perhaps a set of log office chairs, you know where it’s all bound to end up.