https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/...998&j=78544451
Adobe plans to double San Jose workforce with downtown campus expansion
Jul 13, 2017, 11:40am PDT Updated Jul 13, 2017, 1:35pm PDT
INDUSTRIES & TAGS Commercial Real Estate, Technology
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Janice Bitters
Commercial Real Estate Reporter
Silicon Valley Business Journal
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Adobe Systems is slated to buy a parcel of land in downtown San Jose that the company said will eventually hold a fourth office tower, growing its already massive, three-building downtown headquarters.
The new tower will have capacity for about 3,000 employees, more than doubling its current workforce in the city, which today sits at about 2,500 workers.
Adobe Systems Inc., the world's biggest maker of graphic design programs, has called downtown San Jose home more than two decades ago. The company has a three-building campus located at 345 Park Ave. and plans to add a fourth building at 333 W. San Fernando St.
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Adobe Systems Inc., the world's biggest maker of graphic design programs, has called… more
Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced Thursday that it's in contract to buy the parcel at 333 W. San Fernando St. from Wolff Urban Development and JP DiNapoli Cos. The groups have not released a purchase price.
Wolff and DiNapoli have already gone through the entitlement process to get a major office development approved for the site. Late last year, the city of San Jose put the final stamp of approval on an 18-story mixed-use tower with more than 700,000 square feet of retail and office space and both underground and above-ground parking. The glass-encased building has a distinct design, with cutout decks for outdoor gathering spaces and ground-level retail.
In an interview last year, Lew Wolff, chairman and CEO of Wolff Urban Development, told the Business Journal that distinctive as the building design is, the proposal would potentially be a placeholder to get the entitlement process moving in hopes of securing a tenant or buyer for the property.
“We like it [the design] and we hope someone else does, but if they have a different approach we won’t turn them down,” he said in an interview with the Business Journal at the time.
In a blog post Thursday morning, Adobe said many of the specifics for the now development are still in the works, but promised to share more details early next year.
“Expanding our facilities will allow us to hire additional talent to research and build products, serve our customers and continue to grow across virtually every part of our business,” Donna Morris, executive vice president of customer and employee experience at Adobe, said in the blog post. “We’re moving forward on the planning and building process as quickly as we can.”
Like Adobe, Wolff and DiNapoli are no strangers to downtown office development. The two have developed Park Center Plaza, which is now known as CityView Plaza, the San Jose Hilton and the Almaden Financial Plaza.
In a statement provided to the Business Journal Thursday, John DiNapoli, president at JP DiNapoli Cos. praised Wolff and his father Phil, who is the director at DiNapoli Cos., for their efforts in the city's downtown core.
"Lew and my father led redevelopment of the Central Business District when others turned their backs on downtown San Jose," he said, noting that those efforts helped to attract the Adobe expansion that would "add another vital element to Downtown San Jose."
And indeed, for San Jose, this is another big win in a series of major announcements in the last couple months.
In June, Google announced it was looking to build between 6 million and 8 million square feet in a mixed-use campus in downtown, near the Diridon Transit Station. The city is currently working out a deal with the Mountain View-based tech giant to buy a handful of key parcels in the area.
Last week, downtown San Jose saw a major milestone when the building at 303 Almaden sold for $80.15 millio n, or a record $509 per square foot for the area.
And while downtown San Jose has seen numerous tries at a renaissance in past years, none have stuck the way many hoped.
That might be changing with the recent attention the 10th largest city in the U.S. has been getting this year, paired with an upcoming building boom that will bring hundreds of thousands of square feet of commercial space to the downtown core, alongside more than 6,000 units in the coming years, if everything in the pipeline comes to fruition.
But Adobe has had faith in downtown for years. The company was the first major tech group to buy up real estate more than two decades ago when they placed their three-building, 900,000-square-foot office complex at 345 Park Ave., which is across the street at West San Fernando Street, from where Adobe plans to expand.
“We’re thrilled to see many months of work with Adobe and its partners culminate in this announcement of Adobe’s bold expansion of their global headquarters in San Jose, further enhancing Downtown’s burgeoning momentum as Silicon Valley’s urban center,” Mayor Sam Liccardo said in a statement Thursday. “We applaud Adobe for its catalytic role in driving innovation in the Valley over the last quarter century, and we thank its employees for their strong ethos of corporate responsibility which has made the company a wonderful community partner, and a global leader in sustainability.”