Google Buys Again in Mountain View
By Sharon Simonson:
In a long-anticipated property exchange, Google Inc. has acquired The Landmark at Shoreline for $100 million.
The 240,000 square-foot office campus on 18 acres in the city of Mountain View is adjacent to the company’s headquarters at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway and fronts HIghway 101. The property is 90 percent occupied, but existing tenants’ leases are short-term and will expire over the next two or three years.
Broadreach, which was founded in 2002 by the former executive team of Spieker Properties Inc., has had economic control of the Landmark complex since October 2007. It paid $80 million and has made modest investments in its improvement. The negotiations with Google have been ongoing in fits and starts over the last several months, according to a source with direct knowledge of the transaction.
“It seems to me that it is a win-win. It is good for Broadreach and its investors, and it is good for Google because they have secured a large complex across from their headquarters,” said David Hiebert, an executive vice president and managing director for Cassidy Turley BT Commercial. Hiebert sold the property to Broadreach in 2007 and has been a listing broker since.
Mountain View has become an extremely sought-after location for companies seeking an attractive headquarters address, with Shoreline emerging as a favorite for larger companies that need greater amounts of space, Hiebert said. Besides Google, Microsoft Corp., LinkedIn Corp. and Intuit Inc. are located in the Shoreline area.
The city of roughly 75,000 people benefits from its central Silicon Valley and Bay Area location and strong transportation network, which links it well to San Francisco, the East Bay and locations to its south, Hiebert said. Those connections are strong aids in employee recruitment and retention. The city also has done a commendable job over the last decade revitalizing its downtown.
Besides those attributes, Mountain View is close to the executive housing in places such as Los Altos Hills and Atherton and benefits from proximity to Palo Alto, Stanford University and the venture capital community on Sand Hill Road.
Read the entire The Registry article here.
The Peninsula Industrial Pros 