The 18 acre Central & Wolfe Campus Project – 04/21/2016

Menlo Park-based Landbank is now in talks with Apple to take all of the space at the Central and Wolfe Campus in Sunnyvale located at 222 North Wolfe Road, according to multiple sources that track this kind of information in Silicon Valley.

Scott Jacobs, the chief executive officer for Landbank, stated in an e-mail that he couldn’t comment on any specific activity the firm may have on the Central & Wolfe Campus at this time. He also wrote that Landbank does not have any signed leases for the property presently, and that the campus is 100 percent available, and financing for the construction of the property is not a problem at all.

The Central and Wolfe Campus is a 777,000 square foot office redevelopment that is planned to replace a nine-building, 1970s office park that had been build by Jacobs’s father. The property is projected to be ready for occupancy sometime next year, and the San Francisco office of architecture firm HOK is the lead designer on the project.

The Central & Wolfe redevelopment will be a visual marvel for the city of Sunnyvale. The cloverleaf-shaped structure will not only reshape the 18-acre site but also provide an iconic Class A office office building often compared to other exemplary Silicon Valley structures such as the new Apple Campus II in Cupertino, Facebook’s West Campus in Menlo Park and Nvidia’s planned headquarters in Santa Clara, according to a release by the City of Sunnyvale issued last year when the city approved the project.

The city of Sunnyvale has been in an enviable position since the end of the Great Recession. Several mega projects have been announced in the city, and the city had become one of several South Bay battleground cities where technology firms were gobbling up space as soon as it became available. A year ago, Google announced it would lease 1.9 million square feet in Jay Paul’s Moffett Place, which was the largest lease ever done in Silicon Valley and in the country.

Apple has not been sitting idle, itself leasing over one million square feet of space in the recent past. Other companies, such as LinkedIn and cloud security firm Illumio have also followed suit and opened offices in Sunnyvale. According to a second quarter Office Snapshot report by commercial services firm DTZ, Sunnyvale boasts the third lowest office vacancy in Silicon Valley at 4 percent. Only Cupertino and Mountain View, home of Apple and Google, respectively, have lower vacancy.

The Landbank site is located around 1.4 miles from downtown Sunnyvale and is in proximity of two Caltrain stations. There is talk in the future that the project could have a depot for possible shuttle service.

Landbank is an owner, developer of office and R&D properties in the San Francisco Bay Area. According to its Web site, its current focus is the re-development of obsolescent properties into superlative technology-focused workplace environments.