Vertical Ventures Buys San Jose Office Campus for $46M

Sycamore Technology Park. Image courtesy of NorthMarq

In a $45.5 million deal, Vertical Ventures has purchased Sycamore Technology Park, a three-building office/R&D campus in Milpitas, Calif., from a joint venture between Westport Capital Partners and Cannae Partners.

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NorthMarq’s Nathan Prouty led a team that secured roughly $40 million in bridge financing for Vertical Ventures’ acquisition, to fund the planned capital improvements and for future leasing costs. The seller was represented by Cushman & Wakefield’s Eric Fox, Steve Hermann, Seth Siegel, Adam Lasoff and Ryan Venezia. Cushman & Wakefield’s Gregory Davies, Eric Hallgrimson, Steve Horton and Kelly Yoder from the San Jose team will continue to lease the project.

Located within Oak Creek Business Park at 475, 501 and 525 Sycamore Drive, the business park was constructed in 1983. The campus totals 213,519 square feet and is currently 84 percent leased to two tenants. Fox told Commercial Property Executive that wireless network provider Spidercloud takes up 23.6 percent of the space, while medical testing company Spectra Laboratories occupies another 60.5 percent.

“This is in the heart of Silicon Valley and you have a life sciences tenant and an internet business and before them it was a chip company and a disk drive company in this building,” Fox told CPE. “The buildings fit a variety of industries and are well-suited for a lot of technology companies or life science businesses.”

The new owner is planning to invest more capital into the campus by pursuing market-ready renovations to the unoccupied tenant spaces. Vertical Ventures pursued a similar strategy with another office/R&D park in San Jose, Calif. The company invested more than $5.4 million in capital improvements at the Hellyer Oaks Technology Park before selling it to Swift Real Estate Partners for $55.6 million in March. Christopher Aust, head of acquisitions for Vertical Ventures, said in prepared remarks that the Sycamore campus is in a very desirable Milpitas submarket and they would add significant value through the renovations and asset management.

A previous repositioning

Fox told CPE that the joint venture of Westport and Cannae acquired Sycamore Technology Park back in the fall of 2016 alongside another portfolio of four similar buildings nearby. The four-building portfolio had three of its buildings sold to end users and the remaining building was repositioned and leased to MKS Instruments in March, according to Fox.

Following the success of the four-building portfolio, the sale of Sycamore Technology Park represents the last step in the repositioning business plan of Westport and Cannae, Fox told CPE.