In the Silicon Valley Business Journal, Bryce Druzin (my new best friend, now that Nathan Donato-Weinstein went to the City of San Jose and is therefore dead to me) reports that the Sunnyvale Town Center has closed escrow. Wells Fargo no longer owns the property, and the new development team of Sares Regis, Hunter Storm, and JP Morgan has taken possession of the property.
This is a huge deal, and I’ll explain some of what’s happening and what it means. Escrow started back in December, when the Redevelopment Successor Agency (us) approved of the proposed new buyer of the property. It’s more complicated than that – there were a couple of separate transactions and a couple of separate escrows, since the parties wanted to separate out the finished office buildings from the rest of the project. Regardless, there were a lot of legal hurdles that had to be overcome, and this is my best understanding of everything. The new developer wasn’t going to buy the new property without an updated development agreement with the Successor Agency. We approved that back in, oh, June or so. And any new development agreement and resolution of property tax issues involved the redevelopment successor agency. So that required further approval. The first approval had to come from the redevelopment successor agency oversight board, a board comprised of City, County, and school districts representatives. That wasn’t a given, because everything we do with the town center has property tax implications that impact those other bodies.
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