Apple goes from renter to owner of Sunnyvale building in $44M deal

After a couple of large property deals in Silicon Valley last year, Apple is picking up where it left off.

The iPhone and MacBook maker acquired a building in Sunnyvale it was already renting for $44 million, the Mercury News reported. The seller was a partnership of Invesco Real Estate and the Public Retirement System of Nevada, which bought it for about $15 million in 2013 as part of a portfolio purchase, the publication said. The deal was recorded with the Clerk-Recorder’s office on Jan. 14.

Cupertino-based Apple already leased the 105,000-square-foot industrial building at 123 Uranium Drive prior to acquiring it, according to the Mercury News and property records website CompStak. The company’s lease term on the structure began in 2015 and was set to expire sometime this year, CompStak data show.

This marks the second time during the past year that Apple went from renter to owner of property in Silicon Valley. It acquired four office and research buildings in Cupertino for $450 million, or about $986 a square foot, in September. The collection of buildings is within a half-mile of the company’s Infinite Loop complex, which previously served as its corporate headquarters before it moved to a new, larger “spaceship” campus in 2017.

The Uranium Drive building acquisition is Apple’s first publicly reported deal in Silicon Valley this year after a busy 2021 in which it was involved in one of the region’s largest commercial leases and started tenant improvement work on some of its other properties. The company agreed to rent almost 700,000 square feet across six buildings in Sunnyvale in May and told the Mercury News in August that it had launched interior improvements for a pair of buildings in North San Jose.

It’s also doing tenant improvements for an approximately 87,000-square-foot building in west San Jose, the newspaper said.

[The Mercury News] — Matthew Niksa