Mountain View Housing Site Sells After Eight Years
Submitted November 2, 2011, 7:54 PM
Newport Beach-based William Lyon Homes has closed on the acquisition of a more than 26-acre Mountain View property that has been on the market for the better part of a decade and is slated for development into just more than 300 homes.
The seller was the Hewlett-Packard Co. The site is the so-called Mayfield Mall property at 100 Mayfield Ave., and the sales price was in the $55 million range.
Hewlett-Packard was represented in the sale by Richard Ingwers, a vice chairman in the Capital Markets Group for Cushman & Wakefield of California Inc., and Brad Rogers, a C&W executive director. Ingwers and Rogers have represented HP since the property went on the market in 2003.
The brokers did not comment on the sale for the record. Multiple calls to William Lyons were not returned.
The property had previously been under contract to sell to Pennsylvania-based Toll Brothers, another home builder, which had secured the right to develop 481 homes. Its plans were crushed by the financial crisis.
Development costs for the site, which straddles the Mountain View-Palo Alto city line, have been elevated. Not only is there the cost of demolition for the existing structures, but there is a requirement that the developer build an underground tunnel to connect the housing directly to a below-grade Caltrain station. The subdivision and the station are separated by Central Expressway.
Melinda Denis, the Mountain View planner for the Mayfield site, said the city continues to have conversations with William Lyon and has every indication that the company intends to develop the site itself. William Lyon has suffered operating losses since 2007 and reported $22.4 million in net losses for the first half of this year, according to its most recent quarterly financial filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
At the same time, its home sales revenue grew 121 percent in Northern California in the first six months of the year, hitting not quite $25 million. It also reported a 9 percent increase in the average home sales price in Northern California to not quite $400,000, the quarterly report showed.
The home builder has planned to build 258 housing units in Mountain View and 45 in Palo Alto, Denis said. The units are a mix of single-family detached homes, attached condominiums and row houses. “We are working with them now on their construction staging plan,” the planner said.
Notwithstanding the national economic malaise, Mountain View is abuzz with commercial development and sales activity. Denis said the city is processing requests from three companies—Arcshstone, The Prometheus Group and Urban Housing Group, a Marcus & Millichap Co. subsidiary—all of them seeking to build apartments. Merlone Geier Partners recently began demolition for the redevelopment of a high-profile retail corner at the city’s El Camino Real and San Antonio Road. That redevelopment, The Village at San Antonio Center, is separated from the William Lyon site by a few city blocks. Also, in neighboring Los Altos, construction has begun on not quite 20,000 square feet of offices and another 46 housing units, all of it fronting San Antonio Road and within walking distance of San Antonio Center.
