Sunset Development Buys Chevron's 92-Acre HQ for $175M
Bishop Ranch owner reacquires property as oil giant downsizes to office in same complex.
Chevron has sold its 92-acre, 1.3M SF headquarters in San Ramon for $175M to Sunset Development, the firm it acquired the property from in the early 1980s.
Sunset owns the massive Bishop Ranch master-planned development encompassing the Chevron site. Chevron will be downsizing into a 400K SF office building in San Ramon and moving several hundred employees from California to Houston.
The headquarters complex of the second largest oil company in the US, known as Chevron Park, currently includes 13 buildings encompassing 1.4M SF and more than 2,000 workers.
In June, Chevron said in a statement it is offering to cover the moving costs of workers who relocate to Houston, where it occupies the former Enron headquarters at an office that currently employs 6,000.
“The current real estate market provides the opportunity to right-size our office space to meet the requirements of our headquarters-based employee population,” Chevron said.
Chevron said its headquarters will remain in San Ramon. “Chevron will remain headquartered in California, where the company has a 140-year history and operations and partnerships throughout the state,” the company said.
Chevron began as the Pacific Coast Oil Co. in 1879 in San Francisco. The company’s HQ was on Market Street until the headquarters was moved to the San Ramon HQ in 2001. The company also has a refinery in Richmond, in an area known as East Bay.
Sunset Development purchased the 585-acre Bishop Ranch site, a former peach orchard adjacent to Interstate 680, in 1978 and developed it into a 10M SF office park with more than 500 corporate clients.
In 2018, the company began to introduce mixed-use elements at Bishop Ranch, beginning with the $300-million 300,000K SF City Center, which includes retail and restaurants. The 25-year master plan for Bishop Ranch also includes the development of up to 6,000 housing units.
Last year, Sunset announced the $108M sale of a 31-acre parcel at Bishop Ranch to Summerhill Homes, which will develop three residential neighborhoods including 404 single-family units and townhomes.
In January, Related California proposed a 406-unit, seven-story residential building on 5.5 acres of undeveloped land at Bishop Ranch 6201 Bollinger Canyon Road as part of the 135-acre CityWalk master plan, which was approved in 2020.
Numerous office occupiers have been reducing their footprints in the Bay Area. The ancestry-tracking company 23andMe recently announced it is relocating its corporate headquarters from a 155K SF space in Sunnyvale, to a 65K SF office in South San Francisco with a shorter duration lease.