Tishman Speyer Sells Meta Campus in Sunnyvale for $707M

Tishman Speyer has cashed in bigtime on a mid-pandemic bet that it could quickly maximize its return on premium office space it purchased in the burgeoning Sunnyvale, CA tech hub. 

Barely a year after it acquired the assets for $356M, Tishman announced this week it is selling a four-building office complex in Sunnyvale leased entirely by social media giant Meta. According to a Bloomberg report, Tishman is selling the office campus for $707M, nearly double what it paid for it in 2021.

Los Angeles-based CommonWealth Partners is acquiring the office complex, which encompasses 719K SF of office space as well as two parking structures and outdoor recreational space. The property is located on Crossman Drive in the Moffett Park neighborhood of Sunnyvale.

Tishman acquired the office campus in April 2021 from NetApp. In October, Tishman leased the entire property to Meta in last year’s largest new private-sector office lease in the US.

“During a period of significant uncertainty, we seized on a rare opportunity to purchase and reposition an emptying office campus in one of the world’s foremost technology and innovation hubs,” said Carl Shannon, Tishman Speyer senior managing director.

“We’re grateful to our co-investors for their confidence in us, and to (be able to) reward that faith with an outstanding return in just over one year’s time,” Shannon added.

“This was a compelling investment for CommonWealth Partners, increasing our presence in this strategic, high-growth submarket of Silicon Valley to more than a million square feet in the Moffett/Sunnyvale area,” said Brett Munger, CommonWealth’s CEO, in a statement.

The submarket in Sunnyvale has become a hotbed of expansion for tech giants including Google, Amazon and Meta.

Amenities played a big role in drawing the company formerly known as Facebook to the office complex on Crossman Drive. The campus includes a fully equipped gym with a basketball court, lockers and showers, an outdoor sand volleyball court, a bocce-ball court, a putting green, a full-service cafeteria and multiple kitchens.

“The sale and the lease demonstrate that the market for highly collaborative, well-designed office space with accessible green space and top-level amenities is still strong,” Tishman Speyer CEO Rob Speyer said in a release on the sale of the office property.

Tishman’s success in leasing the property to Meta was widely hailed as an early signal of the continued viability of the Silicon Valley office market at a time when many tech companies are embracing remote or hybrid work patterns.