Adobe’s big expansion ends downtown San Jose office tower drought

SAN JOSE — Adobe, a cloud services giant and dominant tech player, is poised to banish a nearly decade-long drought in downtown San Jose: construction of a new office tower in the city’s urban heart.

Within days, Adobe is slated to break ground on a fourth high rise that will dramatically expand the company’s downtown San Jose headquarters campus, a tower that will become a gleaming new addition to the skyline of the Bay Area’s largest city.

“This is extremely important for the downtown,” said Mark Ritchie, president of San Jose-based Ritchie Commercial, a real estate firm.

Construction crews have already begun working with an array of equipment at the office tower site, where dozens of steel beams were staged this week. The groundbreaking is scheduled for June 24.

The tower will enable Adobe to undertake a dramatic increase in its downtown employee presence.

“It takes out another ugly surface parking lot and replaces it with thousands of new workers that will require all manner of amenities, restaurants, fitness, entertainment, daily needs,” said Nick Goddard, a senior vice president with Colliers International, a commercial real estate firm.

The new high rise, which is known as the Adobe North Tower, will have enough room to accommodate 4,000 workers. During 2018, Adobe had estimated that it had roughly 2,500 employees in downtown San Jose.

“The building remains 18 stories tall and the size has increased to approximately 700,000 square feet to allow for more flexibility as Adobe continues to grow,” the company stated in comments that were part of a document submitted to city planners in January. Initially, Adobe had planned a building of 650,000 square feet.

The new Adobe tower marks the beginning of a much-anticipated project. That’s because the last large office building constructed in downtown San Jose was Riverpark 2, which sprouted on West San Carlos Street in 2010.

Adobe gained control of the new tower site in January 2018, when the company paid $68 million for a property with addresses at 333 and 335 W. San Fernando St, according to Santa Clara County records. The sellers were family trusts led by veteran Bay Area developers John DiNapoli, Phil DiNapoli, and Lewis Wolff.

Property experts believe Adobe’s new tower will help spur more activity and interest in downtown San Jose.

” It solidifies Adobe’s presence in the core and just adds more fuel to the fire,” Goddard said.

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