SummerHill Homes spends $108M on 31 office park acres in San Ramon

SummerHill Homes has closed on a $108M deal to purchase 31 acres of land in San Ramon’s Bishop Ranch.

The deal with Sunset Development was in contract for over a year. The developer had already secured entitlement plans from the East Bay city to create three new neighborhoods in the office park and retail center with a total of 404 single-family and townhomes.

It’ s just one small part of a 25-year-plan to redevelop the 135-acre site by adding a residential community with about 4,500 housing units, a hotel and more retail.

Bishop Ranch (SummerHill Homes)

The three SummerHill neighborhoods, dubbed City Village, will rise on the site of a nearly 600,000-square-foot office complex, which is already in the process of being demolished. The development may be able to break ground later this year, SummerHill President Chris Neighbor told the San Francisco Business Times. Sales could begin early next year.

Neighbor grew up in San Ramon and SummerHill—a division of Marcus & Millichap—is based out of Bishop Ranch, though most of its residential developments are in the South Bay. Neighbor said the company will take the lessons it has learned from those properties, plus the demands of pandemic buyers, into account in the new development, which will have a two-acre public park, walking and biking trails and outdoor community gathering spaces.

City Village (Summerhill Homes)

“People want to own, they want their own private space and they want something walkable,” he said. “We have been doing this in Silicon Valley and the core Bay Area for years, so it was mainly the opportunity that attracted us — that we can do these master planned communities right here in Bishop Ranch.”

City Village will be the first housing to come to Bishop Ranch, which Sunset built as purely commercial space in the 1970s. It plans to add thousands of housing units over the next two-plus decades.

The end result will be much like Sunset’s original vision when it purchased the land in 1978, President and CEO Alex Mehran, Jr. told the Business Times. At the time, it was shot down by the city, so the company went ahead with only the office park. The $300-million, 300,000-square-foot retail center was added in 2018.

“Originally we proposed a little bit of everything here in the 1970s — office, industrial and housing — but the people said no to the housing,” he said. “So we built all of these buildings and jobs came here, and now everyone is densifying the office place and so we have more employees fitting into less space, and we are able to put some houses in. So the dream is sort of coming back to 360.”

[SFBT] — Emily Landes 

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