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real estate
Real Estate
Apple to move into very boring New York office tower
Apple will move into a new New York office tower going up on 510 Madison, taking two floors. The building is still under construction, but developer CBRE Richard Ellis has a live construction cam you can use to follow its progress. Glancing at sketches,we expected more from design-obsessed Apple. Other than the pictured garden terrace, and a for-tentants-only indoor pool and health club, the place looks pretty much like every other Manhattan office tower.
real estate
The five drug dens of bad-boy ex-CEO Henry Nicholas
How can everyone have missed the most lurid aspect of the fall of former Broadcom CEO Henry Nicholas? Amidst all the sex and drug charges, we've missed the one subject that really gets people's tongues wagging: real estate. Thanks to laws passed in America's "war on drugs," any property involved in the transportation, storage and sale of illegal narcotics is subject to seizure. Thanks to the magic of Google Maps and Street View, we can also get a glimpse into the somewhat banal landscape of Nicholas's party circuit under the oppressively constant sunshine of Southern California's Orange County and Nevada. Let's start at Broadcom headquarters. More »
2:00 PM on Fri Jun 6 2008
By Jackson West
3,146 views,
6 comments
Latest by MrDo: I almost got a job working at his house. He has IT staff that manage his in-home IT systems. more »
toogle many googlers
Google's suburban sprawl
Google's announcement today of a massive campus expansion was inevitable. Having taken over every last scrap of office park around it not occupied by neighbor Intuit, Google is expanding the Mountain View Googleplex to the west — and, more controversially, to the east, on land owned but poorly used by Nasa. Ignore the happy talk about Google and Nasa's scientific partnerships; those are an obvious fig leaf to cover the use of public land by a private entity. (Let's not even get started on Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt's sweetheart deal to park their party plane on Nasa grounds.) Google has grown to be a powerful employer in the Bay Area, and its wealthy executives donate freely to local politicians, so we should hardly expect the powers that be to stop it. What's good for Google is good for America, or so we'll be told. More »
5:00 PM on Wed Jun 4 2008
By Owen Thomas
5,203 views,
27 comments
Latest by n/a: No surprise that NASA, now friendly with Google who has strong information relationships with China, just had a Chinese spy ring busted for stealing US State Secrets about shuttle systems that could be weaponized, just two weeks after Eric 'the more »
toogle many googlers
Details on Google's new campus at Nasa's Ames base
Google finally announced details of its plans to build a new campus on property owned by Nasa at the space agency's Ames Research Center. The ongoing partnership with Nasa was first announced three years ago. The initial terms of the forty-year lease peg rent at $3.66 million a year, with adjustments to the rate based on property-value assessments and up to five 10-year extensions to the contract. Construction isn't due to begin until 2013, with Nasa approving any designs. Proposed amenities beyond office space on the 44-acre plot will include dining, day care and recreation facilities. Not to mention that the Googlejet, the party plane jointly owned by cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt, will be that much more conveniently parked at the Moffett Field spot that the troika already rents for $1.3 million. Their rental isn't part of the deal, but isn't it convenient that they can negotiate with the same helpful government officials to fill their needs for both work and play?
rumormonger
Facebook employees lived in San Francisco while collecting Palo Alto rent subsidy
Facebook employees who have lost a $600/mo. housing subsidy for living in Palo Alto may want to point the finger at their new adult supervision, COO Sheryl Sandberg, but a tipster tells us they only have themselves to blame: More »
real estate
Facebook's cancelled housing subsidy puts squeeze on Palo Alto landlords
Rumor has it Facebook will no longer pay its employees a $600/mo. housing subsidy for living in Palo Alto. The move comes off as a cheap blow against employees, but it's not. The Craigslist ad in the image above illustrates who the cost-cutting move actually hurts the most: not Facebook employees, but their landlords, who just lost a pack of tenants willing to pay $600 more than anybody else. Say the apartment hunters who put up the ad: "We are looking to pay less than $3k/mo for a 3BR, especially since the Facebook subsidy is gone now."
money can't buy you taste
Gurbaksh Chahal's swingin' bachelor pad in the sky
When we heard that BlueLithium founder Gurbaksh Chahal bought a $6.9 million penthouse, we figured he'd go with something tastefully modern to match the building and his taste in slim suits and slimmer ties. But no, oh no. Think animal skins; a headboard and coffee table monogrammed with his signature "G;" and actual chintz upholstery on the dining room set, which a cheap-looking but showy chandelier hovers over. It's like a pileup on the midcentury-minimalism and rococo-inspired Gucci decadence highway. More »
real estate
Commercial real estate vacancies show no sign of dot-bomb 2.0
Recent reports from local real estate trackers put the amount of office space relinquished by local companies in the last quarter at the highest it has been since the third quarter of 2002 — 436,933 sq. ft, according to commercial broker CB Richard Ellis, or the equivalent of nearly all the space in the Transamerica pyramid. The East Bay and the South Bay also saw an uptick in vacancies. The bankruptcies of Sharper Image, Pay By Touch, and RedEnvelope helped push up San Francisco's vacancy rate, but South of Market remained an untouched bubble of business leases, thanks to expansion by Monster.com, Advent Software, and Splunk. (Photo by Thierry)
Austin, the retirement home for aging software companies
Borland has found cheaper rents in Austin, Texas, a regulatory filing reveals. Cheaper rents, but costly obscurity. Had anyone even heard that the software maker had moved its headquarters from Cupertino? Or heard from the company, period?
crime
San Francisco landlords Kip and Nicole Macy allegedly falsified emails to defame pesky tenant
New details have emerged in the landlord-tenant dispute featuring Palo Alto couple Kip Macy, a software engineer who's worked on FreeBSD, and wife Nicole Macy, a local realtor. Emails were purpotedly fabricated in the name of tenant Scott Morrow, even though he told prosecutors that he has no email account:When a court ruled in Morrow's favor in the eviction case, a lawyer at the firm representing the Macys got an email purportedly from the tenant that read, "One day you are going to come home to the Victorian house ... and find (your three children) missing. Then each day a package will arrive with a piece of them. You are f- with the wrong person."Now a city of renters has turned to Craigslist to exert their anger at the innocent-until-proven-guilty Nicole Macy.
crime
FreeBSD developer Kip Macy arrested for tormenting tenants
Kip Macy, a software developer well-known in FreeBSD circles, purchased 744-746 Clementina in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood with his wife Nicole for $995,000 in 2005. The couple then moved to evict the tenants to replace them with renters who would pay more, which would be a violation of San Francisco rent-control laws and California's Ellis Act. Now they've been arrested after allegedly terrorizing residents who protested: More »
real estate
David Hayden's Pacific Heights manse for sale after foreclosure
Serial entrepreneurial failure David Hayden has had his home transfered to boutique bank Robertson Stephens under a Sheriff's deed — which means that the property was seized to pay debts. The transfer is so new, realtor Bernadette V. Lamothe hasn't even had time to have the place properly staged judging by interior photos. It's now for sale for a mere $14.9 million through Sotheby's. Prospective buyers won't just get an opulent home with fantastic views, but a piece of San Francisco history. More »
real estate
Gurbaksh Chahal buys $6.9 million penthouse
BlueLithium founder Gurbaksh Chahal, who flipped his online-advertising startup to Yahoo for $300 million, recently purchased a penthouse suite at the Infinity on Rincon Hill for $6.9 million according to the San Francisco Business Times. I'm not exactly sure who SF Luxe's Damion Matthews is proclaiming confirmed bachelor Chahal most eligible for — my head is starting to hurt trying to parse exactly what Matthews means by "ladies." Can't get enough of the adorable egoist? His recently released self-promotional YouTube video after the jump. More »
real estate
Eco ego-inflater now available at home
Have you already bored all your remaining friends with how many miles per gallon your Prius gets? San Francisco architect Michelle Kaufmann has the answer for you: prefab homes labeled with "sustainability facts" like CO
real estate
Bay Area hit hard by mortgage foreclosures
While the whole country has been hit hard by the subprime mortgage crisis, with sky-high housing costs the Valley and surrounding area have also felt the pain. How bad is it? HotPad's interactive heatmap of local foreclosures show eastern counties with more than one in 150 foreclosures. Surprisingly enough, there are few in San Francisco, but that probably has to do with most of the population renting — with rents going up, how about an eviction heat map? (Via Good Morning Silicon Valley)
i hate it here
Great place for a startup: rents up 10.3 percent in San Francisco
The best advice you got from successful entrepreneur Patricia Handschiegel? "Don't spend." Good luck with that if you're living in San Francisco. Bootstrapping entrepreneurs and everyone else have to live somewhere and if its in the foggy city its getting yet more expensive for many. San Francisco rents increased 10.3 percent in 2007. According to Curbed, that's the highest rate increase in the country. Rents increased only 7.7 percent in 2006 and a mere 3.8 percent in 2005. Over 60 percent of San Franciscans rent, and it may be time to look into buying for those with savings — on the flip side, home prices fell. Remember the good old days before Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion? (Photo by greencandy8888)
real estate
