Oracle to sell nearly half of office campus in Santa Clara

Oracle has put more than 40 percent of its historic campus in Santa Clara up for sale.

The Texas software giant, formerly based in Redwood City, has listed 52.8 acres of the 81-acre site at 4220 Network Circle, the Silicon Business Journal reported. The asking price is undetermined.

Oracle bought the property – a former grounds for a state mental hospital once known as “The Great Asylum for the Insane” – in 2010 from Sun Microsystems, which redeveloped it for the company’s headquarters.

The property, located near Montague Expressway and Highway 101, contains nearly 15 acres that served what was later dubbed Agnews Developmental Center, which includes an iconic Mission Revival clock tower. It’s protected by an historical preservation easement.

Oracle intends to keep 28 acres that include five office and research-and-development buildings on the north side of the Agnews campus.

The company is offering the property without any redevelopment rights or entitlements, according to documents given to the Business Journal by an unidentified source.

In addition to four historic Agnews buildings, the property contains eight late-1990s office or R&D buildings and a community center with a gym and cafe. Oracle hasn’t used that part of the campus and listed a piece of it for lease for several years, according to the source.

Oracle hasn’t set a price for the property, according to the source, because the site is unentitled and it’s unclear how a future owner may redevelop it.

Instead, the company plans to ask for bids by late January or early February and hopes to close a deal by May, the source said. Eastdil Secured is marketing the property on behalf of Oracle.

The Business Journal reached out to representatives from Oracle and Eastdil Secured for comment, but both companies declined to speak about the sale.

The site could prove compelling to a range of developers, according to the newspaper, with or without entitlements. Santa Clara is ground zero for data centers in the Bay Area, in part because of the relatively inexpensive electricity prices offered by its city-owned utility, Silicon Valley Power. An SVP substation adjoins the portion of the site Oracle plans to keep.

The move to sell the Santa Clara property comes about two years after Oracle moved its headquarters from Redwood City to Austin, Texas.

Since then, the company has downsized its Bay Area offices. Last year, it sold its 17-story office tower in Downtown San Jose for $155 million.

A month after it announced its move to Texas in December 2020, the company subleased 86,000 square feet at 475 Sansome Street in San Francisco, leaving it with 22,000 square feet of offices in the Financial District.

Days later, the software firm listed a 230,000-square-foot office building and parking garage in Belmont, across from its signature Redwood Shores headquarters, for an unknown price.

Last month, it put half its Pleasanton campus up for lease.

Oracle leases or owns about 24 million square feet of commercial space worldwide, but has worked to gradually shrink its footprint. By last June, the company had either sublet or listed 4.7 million square feet, or 20 percent of its total portfolio, according to a regulatory filing.

This month, the firm led by billionaire Larry Ellison put a 320,000-square-foot office complex in Santa Monica up for sale for an unknown price.

In June, Ellison paid $173 million for a 16-acre beachfront estate in Manalapan, Florida, making it the most expensive home sale in the state. That was after he paid $80 million for a North Palm Beach estate.

The co-founder of Oracle and the world’s 11th richest person paid $300 million for 98 percent of Lanai, Hawaii, in 2012. His presence on the island is now pushing out longtime residents.

— Dana Bartholomew

Read more

Los Angeles

Oracle puts Santa Monica office complex up for sale

South Florida

Oracle founder Larry Ellison pays $173M for Jim Clark’s Manalapan estate