It’s not just your friends moving to Oakland: now it’s your friendly neighborhood tech titans.
Oaktown stands to become more of a Silicon City as “Uptown Station,” the trendy name for recently vacated Uptown Sears building, draws close to an anchor tenant (sorry to mix train and ship metaphors).
Since office space costs tenants an average of $65.55 per square foot per year in San Francisco, Oakland’s a steal at around $38 per square foot per year (according to CBRE, a real estate services and investment firm).
Sitting atop the 19th Street BART station, the seven-story, 400,000-square foot building is courting two potential tenants, each a creative or tech company. Currently Oakland is home to Pandora and Ask.com, so we want to know: what could that big Sears sign read next?
Lane Partners, a commercial real estate firm, bought the building for $25 million this year and is to invest $40 million in its renovation. And Gensler, an architecture firm that just moved an office to Oakland, will design an interior complete with a market hall for restaurants and small vendors on the ground floor. Office tenants should move in during 2017. But Lane Partners has announced that two big tech companies are possibly going to take the whole building – they expect to officially say who the new tenants might be in four to six months.
Uptown Station is unique because it's one of just a handful of spaces to offer more than 40,000 contiguous square feet in Oakland's central business district. Aside from office space, the building will also have retail and restaurant space on the ground floor, as well as direct access in and out of its lobby from the 19th Street BART station.
So look out, Mid-Market: next stop, Uptown Station.
[H/t: SF Business Times, photo courtesy of Flickr user Mike Linksvayer]
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