SFF Buys Clarion Offices in Sunnyvale for $46 Million

Another Sunnyvale office building has traded hands as more investors look to get a piece of the pie in Silicon Valley with an influx of tech and artificial intelligence tenants.

New York-based Clarion Partners, acting through an affiliate, sold a 104,000-square-foot research and development office at 384 Santa Trinita Avenue for $46 million, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported. An affiliate of San Francisco-based SFF Realty Partners was the buyer. SFF Realty raised $500 million earlier this year to acquire office and R&D properties across the Bay Area. Newmark’s Western Region Capital Markets team handled the sale.

German tech company Bosch leases the entire 2013-built office building. The firm moved in in 2017 and signed a 10-year lease for the space. Bosch uses the building as an engineering hub focused on electrification and automated driving. West Coast customer support is also housed in the building.

The Santa Trinita building is nestled in a pocket of Sunnyvale home to other tech-focused projects and buildings. Applied Materials is working on its Epic Center, a semiconductor research facility estimated to cost billions when complete, in Sunnyvale. Next to the Santa Trinita building, Applied Materials is also turning a former Fry’s Electronics store into a manufacturing facility.

Offices in Sunnyvale have increasingly garnered the attention of investors with deep pockets. Last year, Apple spent upwards of $1 billion to acquire offices in Sunnyvale and its neighboring hometown of Cupertino. The Tim Cook-led firm followed it up last month with a $162 million office buy at 684 West Maude Avenue. Also last month, Fortinet bought two commercial buildings at 140 and 144 Commercial Street for $15 million, adding to its $47 million purchase of seven properties earlier this year.

Office vacancy in Silicon Valley fell to 14.4 percent in the first quarter, per Colliers’ Q1 report. In the second quarter, Silicon Valley posted its third consecutive quarter of net occupancy gains totaling 313,357 square feet, representing a 123 percent year-over-year increase, according to the firm’s second-quarter report.

— Chris Malone Méndez