Twenty million-plus square feet of career institutional office track record across Silicon Valley's core submarkets. Disposition strategy for the post-2024 office landscape.
The narrative that office is finished does not apply to Silicon Valley's institutional product. What's happened since 2024 is a stratification, not a collapse: Class A campuses with tenant demand from anchor tech tenants (Google, Apple, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic) command pricing within 10–15% of pre-2020 peaks. Class B and C product without a clear path to repositioning has lost 30–50% of value. The institutional buyer universe has changed but not disappeared.
For sellers, this means pricing is no longer a single number — it's a function of tenant quality, lease duration, market rent mark-to-market, and the buyer's view of operational efficiency. National-platform brokers tend to apply 2020 cap-rate logic to 2026 deal flow. We don't.
The buyer pools we're seeing transact today: opportunistic value-add capital (Blackstone, KKR, Brookfield) for Class B with conversion or repositioning paths; cross-border family offices (especially from APAC and the Middle East) for trophy stabilized Class A; and institutional tech-occupant capital making selective HQ acquisitions. Reading which pool is the right target for a given asset is the institutional broker's job.
JM Henderson CRE's founder has personally closed institutional office across Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, San Jose, Redwood City, and East Palo Alto. Career highlights include:
The job has gotten harder. Pricing is harder to defend. Buyer pools are stratified. And tenant credit quality has become the single biggest pricing variable. We've adapted the institutional disposition process accordingly.
Tenant-credit-first underwriting. Every office mandate starts with a detailed read on the in-place tenant roster — credit, expiration, mark-to-market, expansion or contraction signals. Buyers will price based on weighted average lease term and tenant credit before anything else.
Repositioning optionality. For Class B with stabilization questions, we underwrite both stabilized-rent value and conversion paths (residential, lab/R&D, last-mile industrial, data center). Buyers value optionality; sellers price for it.
Tech-occupant outreach. Beyond the institutional buyer pool, we maintain direct relationships with corporate real estate teams at the major Silicon Valley anchor tenants. Owner-user transactions are increasingly material, especially for Class A campuses near the buyer's existing footprint.
Capital markets bridge. For sellers with debt maturities pre-disposition, we coordinate with our lender network (CMBS special servicers, life companies, debt funds) to structure the path that maximizes net to seller — sometimes that's a sale, sometimes it's a refinance bridge then a sale 12 months later.
A confidential read on your asset's current pricing window, the realistic buyer pool, and the right execution path takes 30 minutes and zero obligation. Bring your rent roll and your debt situation; we'll bring the pricing data and the buyer-pool analysis.