City courting high-tech firms City courting high-tech firms (October 15, 2004)

Party for brokers shows off vacant Bayshore properties

By Julie O'Shea

In an effort to fill nearly 500,000 square feet of vacant office space in the North Bayshore business corridor, Mountain View city officials threw a party last week to try and woo Peninsulans interested in commercial real estate.

The event attracted more than 100 brokers, land developers and business owners eager to secure a piece of prime real estate in Silicon Valley.

"We wanted to set up an event to help market and promote North Bayshore," said Leigh Boyd, a city consultant. "You are in the heart of Silicon Valley, and that is where [businesses] want to come."

Hoping to exploit the amenities of the Mountain View business district, leaders from the city and the Chamber of Commerce teamed up with Cornish & Carey to brainstorm ways to attract new tenants to the area's empty office space.

The result was the "North Bayshore Fall Festival," which included a catered lunch, a raffle and a tour of the available buildings. Participants also enjoyed music from a mariachi band, a taco bar, ice cream sundaes and Halloween candy.

The four-hour event, hosted by the Computer History Museum on Shoreline Boulevard, cost roughly $7,000 and was paid for through donations from various local businesses.

Part of the allure is inexpensive rent. While rents peaked at $4 to $5 per square foot in 2000, some buildings such as 2690 Casey Ave. are going for 75 cents per square foot. Other buildings on the market include 1350 Charleston Road for $1.25 per square foot and 2141 Landings Dr. for $2.25 per square foot.

New tenants will also have the benefit of being close to some very famous neighbors, including NASA Ames Research Center, Microsoft and Google.

The city's key selling point did not go unnoticed by those attending the festivities on Oct. 6 at the Computer History Museum.

"With Google having set up camp here, this has become the de facto Silicon Valley," said Jason Peery of Peery-Arrillaga, a brokerage firm in Santa Clara. "This makes [Mountain View] ground zero for tech firms.

"Things are looking up," he added. "I think [Mountain View's] a great location. It's got proximity to the venture capitalists and the attorneys and everything in Palo Alto."

For a while, brokers said they were getting a lot of requests to view space in Palo Alto because of the neighboring city's prestige and proximity to Stanford University.

But "thanks to Google and others, we are making a comeback," Mayor Matt Pear said.

Right now, there is a 20-percent vacancy rate in the North Bayshore district, down from 28 percent in 2001. City officials are hoping to close the gap even more.

"You just don't know how sad it is when you've been here for so long, and you're used to having to push people to come in, because it was just so full," said Ellis Berns, the city's economic development manager.

According to Berns, the North Bayshore area once boasted 100-percent occupancy during the height of the tech boom in 2000.

This is "the engine that drives the downtown community," said Berns, adding that Mountain View officials are willing do whatever needs to be done to fill the space.

"The city's willing to be a partner," he said. "We have a lot of space that is available."

Affordable space is precisely why Gary Naillon, executive managing director of KG Real Estate, drove up from Los Gatos last week.

Naillon said that he was impressed with some of the buildings he toured, but wonders if Silicon Valley will ever see the same type of boom it experienced in the late '90s.

"They have to come up with a different kind of technology," he said. "Computers are old news."

E-mail Julie O'Shea at joshea@mv-voice.com

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