West San Jose office building faces the auction block

A West San Jose office building with a revolving door of owners faces foreclosure for the second time after failed attempts to convert it into residential.

Sacramento-based lender Socotra REIT has pushed to auction off the 11,700-square-foot building at 826 North Winchester Boulevard after the owner didn’t pay its bills, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

Kochland, an affiliate controlled by Kenneth Ryan Koch, a real estate executive based in the Folsom Lake-area town of El Dorado Hills, bought the two-story building in December 2021 for $10.75 million.

He then failed to repay its loan of $6.45 million, according to Socotra, which plans to auction the property before Jan. 1.

Since the start of the pandemic, the building has had three owners and faced two foreclosure proceedings.

The office, known as the Winchester Professional Building, stands empty and is covered by graffiti and surrounded by a chain link fence.

It is, however, in a prime location a few blocks from Stevens Creek Boulevard and the Westfield Valley Fair and Santana Row malls.

In March 2020, Kenneth Colbert, a Redondo Beach-based investor, paid $8.25 million for the building after securing a loan for $6.1 million. After the property’s mortgage became delinquent, the building was auctioned off through a foreclosure proceeding.

In June 2021, a group led by Los Gatos-based Sridhar Capital paid $2.9 million at auction to buy the offices, built in 1958.
Two recent owners had planned housing at the 0.6-acre site.

Last year, Colbert’s group proposed a mixed-use complex with ground-floor shops and restaurants. In May, Koch’s group proposed a five-story mixed-use housing complex. Both projects never received city approval.

In January, a San Jose property that was meant to be the site of an 803-unit affordable housing project at 199 Bassett Street also faced the auction block.

In February, a lender seized control of an unfinished, 15,500-square-foot San Jose shopping center on a busy stretch of Monterey Road.

Last month, two hotel sites in North San Jose also defaulted on their mortgages, with notices filed against 56-room hotelier and a landowner with plans for 200-room development.

— Dana Bartholomew

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