Google's giant lease and buy spree in California: 30,000 more workers?
Google may be on course to expand its already large workforce in the San Francisco area by 30,000 more people.
A sign of many more jobs?
With more and more property being leased and bought, Phil Mahoney, a broker with commercial realty firm Cornish & Carey, said,"I've never seen anything like this sort of expansion from any one company."
Google established its first Silicon Valley presence outside its Mountain View home base in 2011, when it signed a mammoth lease in Sunnyvale.
The San Jose Mercury News, first to report that deal, said Google had also purchased older office buildings, possibly to tear them down and create new first-class office space for its workers.
More recently, Google leased an entire office project still under construction in Sunnyvale, totalling 1.9 million square feet. Real estate experts said it was the biggest office lease in California in at least 15 years. Google recently also bought a six-building office complex in Redwood City totaling 934,000 square feet.
Google intends to occupy both projects, said Meghan Casserly, a Google spokeswoman.The Mercury News quoted insiders familiar with Google saying that Google intended to hire 5,000 workers in the Bay Area every year for at least the next five years. Google had 55,000 employees globally as of Sept. 30. There was no separate breakout for California.
"They are leasing and buying way ahead of their hiring curve," said David Vanoncini, a partner in the San Jose office of commercial realty firm Kidder Mathews.The Redwood City buy is the first time the company has obtained a site between San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
"What Google is trying to do is come up with some options to minimize the commute patterns for their employees," Vanoncini told the Mercury News.
"Their young engineers like to live in San Francisco. So this provides an option so they don't have to drive all the way to Mountain View. It will help Google recruit new talent."
The Redwood City project is situated on the bay front - raising the prospect that Google could ferry employees by water to and from San Francisco.The first of the Sunnyvale buildings won't be completed until sometime in 2015.
Google is also still looking at a proposed one million-square-foot campus on the NASA Ames Research Center grounds that could accommodate 5,000 workers.
"There are some 800-pound gorillas in Silicon Valley," Jim Beeger, a senior vice president with commercial realty firm Colliers International told the Mercury News, "but what Google is doing is the granddaddy of 800-pound gorillas."