SANTA CLARA — A veteran development company has scooped up a big-box retail site that’s currently home to a large hardware store in an area where Apple has leased buildings for hush-hush projects.
LBA Realty, acting through an affiliate, has bought a 5.8-acre site at the southwest corner of Kifer Road and Bowers Avenue in Santa Clara, according to property and business records.
The property, located at 2800 Kifer Road, includes a large industrial building that is leased to a retail outlet for HD Supply Home Improvement Solutions, a major hardware retailer and wholesaler in Northern California. The store is frequented by contractors, construction firms, and individual customers.
LBA Realty bought a property that is at a prominent corner in Silicon Valley — and a site that also is near multiple buildings leased to Apple for work that is shrouded in secrecy but has spurred considerable speculation, including talk of an autonomous car venture.
LBA NCC2 Co. XIV, the LBA Realty affiliate, paid $43.5 million for the property, public documents filed in Santa Clara County on Aug. 7 show. The purchase included the hardware store building, which totals about 141,000 square feet and was built in the mid-1970s. The seller was an investment group based in Los Angeles, public records show.
At the time of the purchase, the assessed value of the property was listed at $5.5 million.
About two blocks away at 3000 through 3008 Kifer Road, Apple has leased two buildings. The tech titan began undertaking interior construction on the buildings, located at the corner of Kifer Road and Uranium Drive, in the summer of 2017.
A few doors away, Apple has leased a building with addresses of 2855 through 2865 Uranium Drive.
Cupertino-based Apple has confirmed all of these leases on and near Uranium Drive but hasn’t discussed the nature of the operations inside the structures.
The Santa Clara property that LBA has just purchased could be an attractive redevelopment site over a longer-term period.
LBA is no stranger to major redevelopment ventures on older sites.
The company is building a logistics center in San Jose totaling 180,000 square feet along Interstate 880 at 1605 Industrial Ave., a project that has replaced a long-time retailer of specialty truck parts.
Also in north San Jose, LBA is developing North Town, a mixed-use complex of offices, hotel rooms, retail, and restaurants at the corner of West Trimble Road and Orchard Parkway. That project would replace older research and office buildings.
The 2800 Kifer Road building in Santa Clara that LBA bought this month occupies slightly more than half of the entire parcel. With a huge parking lot, it might someday be feasible to bulldoze the building and replace it with a modern development of some sort.
