Google buys Mountain View building near tech titan’s iconic office hubs

MOUNTAIN VIEW — Google has bought a Mountain View building near two of the tech titan’s iconic office hubs in a deal that gives the company ownership of a building it was already occupying.

The search giant paid $32.8 million for an office building about a block from the company’s Google Gradient Canopy building and a few blocks from the Googleplex headquarters campus, documents filed on Dec. 18 with the Santa Clara County Recorder’s Office show.

Google has frequently bought properties, large and small, primarily in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, North San Jose, and downtown San Jose over a period of several years.

Here are some examples of Google’s purchasing activities in recent years:

• In 2018, Google paid $1 billion for a 51.8-acre, 12-building Mountain View office hub that at the time was known as Shoreline Technology Park.

• In 2019, Google paid $1 billion for several Sunnyvale properties sold by Verizon that included the one-time headquarters of Yahoo!

• Over a period of roughly three years, starting in December 2016 and ending in March 2019, Google paid an estimated $445 million to collect dozens of properties in downtown San Jose. Google wanted the land for a mixed-use neighborhood known as Downtown West. In 2023, Google paused development of the downtown transit village, saying it was reassessing the project’s timeline.

• Google has also bought office buildings and large industrial properties in North San Jose.

The tech titan also purchased properties in Palo Alto and Redwood City.

As for the recent Mountain View deal, Jeffrey A. Morris Group, a Bay Area real estate firm that acted through an affiliate, sold the office building to Google, according to the county public documents.

Mountain View-based Google bought the building through an all-cash deal, the county real estate files showed.

The building is at 1808 North Shoreline Boulevard and totals 21,900 square feet, according to documents on file with Mountain View city planners.

In 2023, the Morris Group firm floated a proposal to develop a 108,900-square-foot office building. The big office project never broke ground.