A Whole Lot of Development
He may not be the Six Million Dollar Man, but you might call Sares Regis Group of Northern California's commercial development president Jeff Birdwell the "3M SF man." He's got at least that amount of square footage on his plate right now.
SRGNC CRES, a division, recently was named development manager for NVIDIA's new HQ in Santa Clara. Like any big campus in Silicon Valley nowadays, the 1M SF (ultimate buildout) campus boasts an innovative design. It's being built in two phases of 500k SF, beginning with Phase 1 in June (no timetable yet for Phase 2). The triangle-shaped building was designed by Gensler with Webcor as general contractor. According to Jeff, the project's strategy deals with connecting people in a creative environment and in close proximity, because when people have chance interactions, "that much more magic happens." (The layout will result in a lot of great business ideas and maybe a few marriages.) In that vein, the designers are working to blur the lines between the two floors--not stairs, but stairscapes that create a level of permeability and transparency. Although the 250k SFfloorplates won't be the largest Jeff has ever built, they compare with 30k SF for a typical spec building.
Jeff recently wentthrough a hearing--with more to come--on the year-long city approval process for Deutsche Asset and Wealth Management's plans for an office campus at 700 Middlefield Rd inMountain View. SRGNC, the development manager, is still gaining clarity as to how much density the city and elected officials will allow, but Jeff says the site, which currently houses 400k SF of buildings, could be redeveloped with up to 1M SF. In this case, there's no tenant identified. (Good thing Synopsys' lease runs through 2015.)SRGNC also is the development manager for Google's 1.1M SF project, which aims to be the world'slargest LEED Platinum building. (As long as they don't steel our idea for the world's largest LEED Platinum Ferris wheel.) That one's also about connecting people, Jeff says, noting most of the companies out here believe innovation happens as a result of connecting people together, sparking the general trend for floorplates to grow.
According to Jeff, most of the campus developments that SRGNC's working on involve a financial austerity not present in previous market cycles. (We're talking about you, dot-com boom.) Just because companies have a lot of money "doesn't mean they're willing to spend it in other than a fiscally responsible way." While he's hard at work on massive projects,Jeff leaves room for the little things, too. Like coaching his son's fifth grade basketball team, which just won the Menlo Park school district championship (Oak Knoll vs. Encinal, 21-20).
