Yahoo currently owns and leases approximately 1.8 million square feet in Sunnyvale, where it is headquartered, and leases an additional 419,000 square feet on Great America parkway in Santa Clara. Yahoo filed an application for entitlements for the new campus development in nearby Santa Clara a little more than a year ago. The city's planning department is now reviewing the draft environmental impact statement, which will soon be distributed for public comment. That would put the project on track to receive final approval from the City Council sometime in the first half of 2010.
While project approval could come in the near-term there are apparently no near-term development plans. A Yahoo spokesperson tells GlobeSt.com there is no timeline for development or firm plans for how the campus would be utilized. While Yahoo isn't providing any cost estimates either such an undertaking would easily top $1 billion, according to local development sources.
The property is located between Old Ironsides Drive and Patrick Henry Drive off of Tasman Boulevard, next to a light rail station. TMG assembled the contiguous acreage in multiple transactions beginning in 2001. The bulk of the property is a 40-acre former Siemens campus that holds 600,000 sf of single-story R&D-type buildings. The buildings are "mostly vacant" and house no Yahoo employees, according to the spokesperson.
Yahoo! reportedly evaluated over 50 Bay Area sites from San Francisco to San Jose. One of the key factors in its search was proximity to its headquarters in Sunnyvale.
At the time Yahoo acquired the property, TMG Partners chief executive Michael Covarrubias told Globest.com that Yahoo would eventually scrape the site and build 2.5 million square feet of office space in multiple mid-rise buildings, which would put it on par with Google's headquarters in nearby Mountain View. Covarrubias said TMG would "work with" Yahoo on securing the entitlements "and hopfully more," referring to the possibility of managing the development side of things as well. (For that story, click here ). Covarrubias was out of town Friday and not immediately available to provide an update in that regard.
Meantime, Yahoo is still looking to sublease at least one vacant leasehold. In January, it began marking a pair of eight-story class-A office buildings on Mission College Blvd. here as part of a cost reduction initiative that included 1,600 layoffs in the final three months of 2008 as well as $108 million in severance, facility and other restructuring costs. The company's leasehold on the 385,000-square-foot development at 2811-2821 Mission College expires in August 2010. The company exited the space in June and a spokesperson tells GlobeSt.com no sublease tenant has been secured.
The owner of the buildings is the Sobrato Organization. Mike Field, Sobrato's director of real estate tells GlobeSt.com that yahoo had a brokerage firm marketing the sublease. With just about one-year remaining on the sublease, Field says Sobrato began marketing the space last month and has received early interest in the space.
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