Apple Buys 816K SF Office Complex in San Diego for $445M

Apple has made its first property acquisition in San Diego, a $445M purchase of the 67.5-acre Rancho Vista Corporate Center, an eight-building complex encompassing 817K SF in the city’s Rancho Bernardo submarket.

The deal, reported by the San Diego Union-Tribune, enlarges Apple’s office footprint in San Diego to more than 1M SF and will help facilitate the tech giant’s plan to increase its workforce in the city to 5,000.

In recent weeks, Apple inked two office leases in San Diego, including 53K of space at the Rancho Vista Corporate Center, located on West Bernardo Drive, and the entire footprint of a 95K building known as The Point at 16765 West Bernardo Drive.

Last summer, the iPhone maker signed leases in two buildings totaling 165K SF in the University Town Center submarket of San Diego.

Apple signed a 92K SF lease at La Jolla Reserve, an office campus at 4401, 4435 and 4445 Eastgate Mall, a 300K complex owned by The Irvine Company. Apple also took a 73K SF lease for space in a 13-story office building owned by American Assets Trust located at 4704 and 4747 Executive Drive at La Jolla Commons.

Now that it has acquired a large office complex in Rancho Bernardo, a master-planned community, analysts suggested that the company may consolidate its workforce at the Rancho Vista complex.

Apple has been rapidly expanding its footprint across California. In June, the tech giant signed a lease for a newly built office campus in Sunnyvale, CA, bringing the tech giant’s footprint in that city to more than 800K SF.

Apple’s leases in Sunnyvale secured both buildings of developer and owner Jay Paul Co.’s new Mathilda Commons office complex, which features two four-story Class A buildings encompassing 382,500 SF.

Apple occupies two other buildings, owned by Kilroy Realty and totaling about 425,000 SF in Sunnyvale, also on North Matilda Ave. The Kilroy buildings and the new Mathilda Commons complex are about eight miles from Apple’s new HQ in Cupertino, CA.

Apple is moving forward with its office footprint expansion in CA despite being forced by an employee backlash to retreat in May from a return-to-office mandate it issued in April. With its new $5B HQ nearly empty, Apple had said it would require workers to come to the office three days a week.

In May, Apple sent a note to employees that it would start a “pilot program: to bring some workers back to the office for two days a week, but anyone in that program who felt “uncomfortable coming into the office” would have “the option to work remotely,” according to a report in the NY Times.

Before the pandemic began, Apple committed to invest $430M in the US over the next five years, creating more than 20,000 jobs.