SAN JOSE — A big office building in San Jose has been bought for slightly more than its prior price — yet the $30 million-plus deal nevertheless hints at a brutal real estate market in the Bay Area.
Blue Owl Real Estate Capital, through an affiliate, paid $35.5 million for the office building at 1010 Rincon Circle, documents filed on June 10 at the Santa Clara County Recorder’s Office show.
The Chicago-based real estate firm bought the building through an all-cash deal.
To be sure, the price Blue Owl Real Estate paid is 8.9% higher than the $32.6 million that the seller, a joint venture of Machine Investment Group and Baudpont Capital paid for the building in November 2021.
Even so, investors would have been better off putting the money into other investments such as American stocks.
Over the same period from November 2021 through June 10 that the sellers owned the building, the S&P 500 Index, the broadest measure of U.S. stocks, rose 14%.
The local inlation rate outpaced the building’s value. Bay Area consumer prices rose 11.2% over the same period the sellers had owned the office site.
Soon after buying the office building, which totals 90,900 square feet, Machine Investment and Baudpoint Capital attempted to sell the property by flipping it.
In the spring of 2022, just months after buying the office building, Machine and Buadpoint offered the building for sale with an asking price of about $55 million.
At that time, the Bay Area office market’s weakness had yet to come into view in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak that spawned government-mandated business shutdowns starting in March 2020.
In 2022, the tech industry’s waves of Bay Area layoffs amounted to no more than a barely noticeable ripple for the region’s economy.
By 2023, however, the tech sector’s job cuts became a storm surge that swamped the commercial real estate market and washed away office building values in the Bay Area.
Related Articles
Google ready to launch downtown San Jose village
Big East Bay shopping center is bought in deal that tops $35 million
San Jose tech and biotech incubator hub gains traction and tenants
San Jose food bank preps warehouse shutdown after facing rent hike
San Jose housing development near downtown gets key loans for project
A growing number of Bay Area office buildings are being sold for far less than what the sellers paid for them just a few years earlier. Foreclosures due to delinquent loans have begun to haunt the region’s office market to a significant extent.
These weaknesses in the regional office market are a reminder that some segments of the Bay Area economy have begun to erode due to the economic afflictions that the coronavirus has unleashed.
Bottom line: Buildings that lack tenants can’t generate income so property owners can pay off their mortgages, a dynamic that throttles cash flow and frequently shoves buildings into foreclosure.
In the case of the 1010 Rincon Circle building, which is near the interchange of Interstate 880 and Montague Expressway, the building is fully occupied by a robust tech tenant.
Quanta Cloud Technology, also known as QCT, leases all of the 1010 Rincon Circle building through a long-term rental deal. QCT provides hardware and cloud-based software for data centers, which are a fast-growing tech industry sector.