June 29, 2023
Just a week after it closed on a $52 million acquisition of a Sunnyvale parcel, Pulte Homes is buying a 6.3-acre site in Saratoga from Peter Pau’s Sand Hill Properties for $55 million. The sale, which just closed, is for a site located at 18764 Cox Ave. and is the site of Sand Hill’s proposed Quito Village, which the City of Saratoga approved in April of 2020. Quito Village is a proposed development that is planning to deliver 91 townhomes that will range in size from two to four bedrooms. As part of its offering, the development team will also include nine, or ten percent, very low-income homes on the property as part of the 91 units, according to the development’s web page. The development will also add 5,000 square feet of retail space and parking for a total of 233 cars—180 garage spaces and 53 surface spots. Plans for Quito Village called for the commercial building to be constructed in the first phase in order to allow the existing Starbucks café and Saratoga Vision Center tenants to be retained in the new project. As part of the new commercial building, the developer was also planning to add a publicly accessible courtyard area. The team envisioned an open environment with tables and chairs for outdoor dining, benches and other amenities to create a space that is inviting and comfortable for public use. Efi Luzon The sale between Pulte Homes and Sand Hill Properties was brokered for both sides by Los Altos-based Efi Luzon, head of Intero Capital Markets, a national investment sales platform that he has been leading out of Silicon Valley since 2019 following a 15-year career with the firm as the number one agent in California and number two agent nationally, with more than $6.9 billion in sales. Luzon declined to provide a comment when reached about this deal. Luzon and Sand Hill Property have worked together for years. In 2019, he helped broker the company’s $250 million acquisition of the I. Magnin building, located at 233 Geary St. in San Francisco’s historic Union Square, who ch Sand Hill Property purchased from Macy’s. In 2014, the pair worked on Sand Hill Property’s acquisition of the long-struggling 1.3-million-square-foot Vallco Shopping Mall in Cupertino for $320 million. Sand Hill Property is renaming Vallco to The Rise, which will be transformed into a visionary 7 million square foot development, designed with years of community input to provide an iconic, forward-thinking town center at the heart of the city renowned for design and technology and as the home of Apple. Luzon’s firm, Intero and an associate team will continue to play an active role in the upcoming years adding to the success of The Rise, achieving a long-term vision for the development devised years ago and coming full circle from when that process began. Atlanta, Ga.-based Pulte Homes preceded this acquisition with a purchase in Sunnyvale of a five-acre parcel for $52 million from the Sobrato Family Foundation. The lot, located at 1139 Karlstad Ave. is just south of State Route 237 and east of US Highway 101, at the west edge of Silicon Valley’s Golden Triangle, and it may be the only remaining developable parcel in this residential neighborhood. Pulte, which is coming off of an exceptional second quarter that saw its revenues grow by 18 percent to $3.8 billion, is entering a market that is deeply supply-constrained. According to a recent, July of 2022 Yardi Matrix Multifamily Report for Silicon Valley, multifamily assets showed strong fundamentals approaching midyear 2022. This is partially driven by the lack of new housing provided in the market, but also by high occupancy rates over 95 percent and unemployment in the region that is at the lowest level in a decade at 2.2 percent, outpacing both the national and state averages.
