IANS | 05 Nov, 2023
Google has ended its $15 billion deal agreement with Lendlease, the
developer the company had been working with on major campus projects in
the Silicon Valley.
Lendlease said in a statement that both companies agreed to end
the deal after determining that "the existing agreements are no longer
mutually beneficial given current market conditions."
The four
master-planned districts are in San Jose (Downtown West), Sunnyvale
(Moffett Park), and Mountain View (Middlefield Park and North Bayshore)
in the San Francisco Bay area in California, collectively referred to as
the San Francisco Bay Project.
The development could have totalled over 15 million square feet of "office, residential, retail and other space."
Google
and Lendlease agreed to the original $15 billion deal in 2019 and
planned to spend 10 to 15 years redeveloping Google’s land across
locations.
However, the pandemic significantly changed business
real estate needs after companies shifted toward hybrid work. Google's
senior director of development Alexa Arena said that the company is
looking at "a variety of options" to meet its housing commitment.
"We’ve
been optimising our real estate investments in the Bay Area, and part
of that work is looking at a variety of options to move our development
projects forward and deliver on our housing commitment. We appreciate
Lendlease and the work the team has done to get us to this point," Arena
added.
As part of the decision to end these agreements, Lendlease
will receive a payment in consideration for value created through the
entitlement and master planning process. Lendlease will remove the San
Francisco Bay Project, which was expected to commence construction in
FY26, from its development pipeline.