Former Goldman Sachs Executive Acquires SJ Warehouse

An entity traced to former Goldman Sachs associate Kelly Ho has acquired a 130,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in San Jose for nearly $38 million, according to property records.

The price works out to about $291 per square foot.

The property is located at 1980 Senter Road and was sold for $37.8 million by Wyoming-based Exeter Way LLC. The manufacturing facility was built in 1966 and renovated in 2022. The facility is close driving distance to highways 101, 237 and 87, as well as seven minutes to the Bart station. The property was sold for more than double its appraised property value of $15 million, according to property records.

The trade comes as the San Jose industrial market has experienced a slight cooldown, despite a few large transactions in the first quarter, according to a report by Kidder Mathews. The availability rate for warehouse space increased quarter-over-quarter from 3.7 percent in the fourth quarter last year to 4.2 percent in the first quarter. Vacancy also rose to 2.6 percent from 2.3 percent.

Leasing activity for warehouses took a sharp decline from 730,000 square feet in the fourth quarter to 173,000 square feet in the first quarter. Despite this slowdown, investors are bullish on the market because of strong demand for data centers.

“The Silicon Valley industrial market has not been immune to the economic downturn,” the report states. “There has been a notable slowdown with industrial and warehouse products in first quarter 2023; however, even with the reduced activity, data center clients are actively seeking to acquire and adapt outdated industrial properties for their operations.”

There were a few large transactions in Silicon Valley in the first quarter, with the largest Amazon.com’s purchase of a 730,000-square-foot building in Santa Clara for $238 million, or $326 per square foot. Ho’s most recent transaction would have ranked second last quarter in terms of price, and the middle of the pack in terms of price per square foot.

Ho worked nearly eight years for Western Digital, a maker of data storage devices, according to her LinkedIn profile. She left in late 2021. The entity that purchased the San Jose property is named Ho Enterprises, a limited liability company.