Apple Buys Cupertino Office Building at Discount

In an otherwise distressed Silicon Valley office market, Apple has acquired a Cupertino office building for $70 million.

The iPhone maker bought a four-story office building at 10200 South De Anza Boulevard, a property that’s about two miles from the company’s Cupertino world headquarters at Apple Park, as first reported by The Mercury News.

It was an all-cash purchase, documents filed with Santa Clara County show. The building totals roughly 161,000 square feet and occupies about 1.3 acres near the corner of South De Anza Boulevard and Cali Avenue, a few blocks from Stevens Creek Boulevard. San Francisco-based investment firm Rubicon Point Partners, which bought the building in 2019 for $107.5 million, was the seller.

The property was in a prime location in 2019, which fetched the premium price. But after Bay Area employees showed a persistent preference to work remotely even after the pandemic, the building, like countless others, has declined in value.

The building’s official valuation was $109.7 million in July 2020, which reflected the price Rubicon paid about a year earlier. But as the coronavirus raged, the office building’s value fell to $92.8 million in July 2021 before rallying a tiny bit to a value of $94.6 million in mid 2022, county Assessor’s Office documents show. The $70 million that Apple paid represents a 35 percent nosedive compared to the building’s value when it was previously bought four years ago.

The deal shows that large tech companies are willing to expand. The location could house 800 employees and Apple recently unveiled plans to redevelop its Cupertino headquarters to add 140,000 square feet of office space. However, other companies are shedding millions of square feet of space; for example, Google has announced it will offload 1.4 million square feet of space in Silicon Valley and halt its Downton West project in San Jose.

— Pawan Naidu