News
SV: Healthy, Wealthy and Wise (Investment)
April 18, 2012
| You won’t want to be MIA from Bisnow's upcoming summit, April 26 at the Marriott San Mateo, where we’ll attempt to solve at least six of Hilbert’s math problems. (Actually, we’ll be discussing the latest happenings in Silicon Valley.) We’ve got a great line-up of speakers, and here’s three of them. |
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| Recently we spoke with Google project executive Jay Bechtel, who’s almost finished adding a second café (14k SF on the sixth floor) at Hills Plaza (above). Besides extensive food service, Google has a gaggle of ways to create “fun, interesting workplaces for our people.” For example, take away single-person offices, and toss in a lot of open bullpen areas, amenity spaces, break rooms, and informal meeting areas (bean bag chairs), ping pong and Foosball tables, and fresh fruit. But in one respect, Google’s no different from other companies: It requires space to keep up with employee growth. “Predicting headcount is an inexact science, so we have to be flexible and responsive to the business.” Mountain View-based Google is looking at developing its own space within the next couple of years, Jay says, because there aren’t any big spaces left in its hometown. “We want to stay in Mountain View, and this is the only way to do that.” |
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| Yesterday we spoke with Orchard Partners managing partner Mike Biggar, who tells us Orchard is nearing completion on its largest current project: SFO Logistics Center, the 580k SF rehab of an old postal center in South San Francisco. It’s being repositioned as a Class-A logistics center targeting freight tenants. Orchard’s also in the marketing phase for The Landing at Great America, a 220k SF,fully entitled office building in Santa Clara, and drawing up repositioning plans for a 50k SF R&D building it bought last year in Moffett Park. Additionally, Orchard’s actively reviewing deals and making offers on a weekly basis. According to Mike, the market’s in a period of growth "that can only be rivaled by the dot-com run-up” (but without the bubble). “There’s a lot of strength in this market across different technology sectors.” On the topic of different, Mike co-founded the Ultimate Frisbee team at Stanford, competing on an inter-collegiate level. |
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| We also chatted yesterday with Jeff Birdwell, commercial division president of Sares-Regis Group of Northern California. Right now he’s working on more than 3M SF of projects in Silicon Valley. About half of that is working directly for tenants like Informatica, which SRGNG helped acquire a new $149M, 290k SF HQ in Redwood City. The balance is with financial partners like Northwestern Mutual Life and new partner RREEF, for whom it’s evaluating a potential 1M SF corporate campus redevelopment. Within the past two weeks, SRGNG has submitted proposals on $1B worth of additional projects, evenly divided between corporate campuses (including a really big one—stay tuned) and public-sector work. Visiting project sites shouldn’t be a problem for Jeff. He’s an instrument-rated pilot who’s been flying single- and twin-engine planes for more than 30 years (including this evening’s jaunt to Monterey). “It’s also handy for popping over to Sacramento.” |
