Brandenburg buys Campbell Staples
Now, San Jose’s Brandenburg Properties can say: “Staples. Yeah, we’ve got that.”
The longtime area real estate investor last week acquired property that’s home to a Staples store at 500 E. Hamilton. The price for the 20,000-square-foot building (on 1.8 acres) was $6.125 million, or about $306 per square foot, according to title records. Earlier this year, Brandenburg paid roughly $3.1 million for a .6-acre site next door, occupied by a Shell gas station.
The two deals give Brandenburg a very high-profile site right off the Hamilton Avenue freeway exit. It’s unclear what the plans are for the location. (A call to the city’s planning department turned up nothing of note.)
“We’re long term real estate investors in the valley — over 50 years now — and certainly pleased with our recent acquisition of the Staples property joined with our earlier acquisition of its next door neighbor, the Shell-branded site,” said Bill Baron, a partner at Brandenburg, in a statement.
Bruce Frazer and Randol Mackley at SRS Real Estate Partners represented both sides in the deal.
I’ve noted in a few stories that Lennar was in contract to snap up a development site from Lyon Communities in Milpitas near the new BART station. Well, wait no longer: It’s officially a done deal.
Affiliates of the homebuilding powerhouse just closed on the site, located at 450 Montague Expressway. It’s a chunk of dirt where Lennar wants to build a five-story, 351-unit building as well as 138 condos, according to city planning documents. The seller of the bulk of the land was Lyon Communities, which was working on another plan for the project. (Lyon, as you may recall, just bought a five-acre property from Integral down the street.)
The Lennar affiliates acquired the Lyon site, which is about 7.8 acres by my calculations, for $30.5 million, according to title documents. An adjacent 3.4-acre parcel owned by Intertile Distributors went for $7.85 million.
Milpitas residential development near the BART station is the hottest thing going right now. See my story from last week on SummerHill getting into the act.
This is not Milpitas’ only play in the city. In March, Lennar bought a 10-acre site zoned for single-family residential (the unicorns of Bay Area residential real estate) for $25 million.
As tenants like Apple Inc. and others expand in Peery Park, it just makes sense that investors would be close behind. The latest evidence of that: Sand Hill Property Co. recently paid $14.45 million, or $368 per square foot, to pick up the 39,311-square-foot Sunnyvale offices of Jawbone at 674-678 W. Maude Ave.
The deal is the latest sign of investor interest in this part of Sunnyvale. I recently wrote about Kinship picking up a couple of buildings in this same neighborhood. The district is primed for redevelopment under the city’s new Peery Park plan, which is expected to allow more modern projects to sprout up here.
Michael Cisterno, a senior vice president with Transwestern, represented the seller, Ben London of London Management Corp., a New York-based investor. He said the pricing of recent deals in the area is the highest he’s seen, but that the valuations make sense.
“Intrinsically, from a value standpoint, that market is so highly coveted — the dirt often times is worth just as much as the improvements,” he told me. “When you have such a strong confluence of wealth and tech nestled in that region of the state, it speaks to the intrinsic demand and value.”
Diane Armstrong and Mark Giovanzana of Colliers International represented Sand Hill.
Admiral Capital Group and joint-venture partner South Bay Development Co., sold 4500 Great America Parkway in Santa Clara. A news release did not identify the buyer or price, but title records show that an affiliate of Palo Alto-based CM Capital Corp. paid just under $24 million, or $324 per square foot, in early March. Admiral acquired the property in June of 2013 and renovated it.
Daniel Bassichis, co-founder of Admiral, said in a statement: “The repositioning of 4500 Great America with South Bay was a great success and positioned the asset well in today’s market. The capital invested provided maximum flexibility to a future user and ultimately attracted the ideal buyer.”
Sherman Chan Ben Knight of CBRE represented the buyer. Todd Shaffer and Mike Saign of Newmark Cornish & Carey represented the seller.