Google has tapped the Royal Bank of Canada’s Scott Foster as its new head of real estate, replacing David Radcliffe, who’s stepping down from the position next month after 16 years at the helm.
Radcliffe will retire at the end of the year but will stay on with the Mountain View-based search engine until then to help with the transition, he and Foster said in separate LinkedIn posts. Radcliffe told Google about his plans to leave in 2019 to spend more time with his family, but decided at the start of the pandemic to stay on to help the company navigate changing business needs and Covid-induced complexities, CFO Ruth Porat said in a statement.
Since Radcliffe joined Google in 2006, the company’s global headcount has grown to 174,000 from 3,000, and it now has offices in more than 180 cities, according to a spokesperson. Google’s worldwide footprint totaled about 40 million square feet in July 2021, about a fourth of which it operates as a landlord, Radcliffe said in a podcast interview at the time. The company opened its 1.1-million-square-foot Bay View campus in Mountain View in May, the first ground-up project it’s developed on its own.
Foster joins Google after spending three years at the Royal Bank of Canada, that country’s largest lender. During his tenure, the bank formed a $5 billion real estate partnership between its asset management arm, pension fund manager British Columbia Investment Management, and QuadReal Property Group.
On the surface, Foster seems to be an outside-the-box hire by Google, given the lack of similarities between one of the tech industry’s largest companies and the bank. He will wear several hats as the company’s new head of real estate, including overseeing its $1 billion housing commitment in the Bay Area; monitoring the effectiveness of Google’s return-to-office mandate after it required Bay Area employees and those in several other U.S. locations to work from the office three days a week starting in April; and working to advance Google’s plans to develop large mixed-use projects in Sunnyvale, Mountain View and San Jose in partnership with Lendlease.
Before joining the Royal Bank in 2019, Foster was the chief operating officer at consulting and design firm Nelson Worldwide for three years and helped oversee Bank of America’s corporate workplace division for a decade. He has received CoreNet Global’s Master of Corporate Real Estate designation and has been a member of the corporate real estate association since 2009, according to his LinkedIn page.
While Google hasn’t been taking down blocks of space in the Bay Area at the same rate as before the pandemic, its cloud computing division recently subleased 300,000 square feet of offices in San Francisco. Google said in April that it plans to spend over $3.5 billion on offices and data centers in California this year, underlining the state’s importance in its real estate strategy.
Outside of California, Google is renovating the 1.2-million-square-foot James Thompson Center in Chicago ahead of a 2026 move-in. The company struck an agreement with developer Michael Reschke in July to acquire the property for $105 million, a deal that could help reverse Chicago’s commercial real estate brain drain.
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