SAN JOSE — A San Jose office building near the city’s big malls that lurched into foreclosure, was seized by its lender, and is deemed to be an eyesore has been bought by a Bay Area real estate investor.
The building, located at 826 North Winchester, was bought for slightly more than $6.5 million, according to documents filed on Sept. 21 with the Santa Clara County Recorder’s Office.
The office building, which is scarred by graffiti and is said by its neighbors to be a blighted property, has been bought, seized through foreclosure, bought by a new owner, and then seized through foreclosure again in June of this year, prior to the most recent purchase.
The merry-go-round of transactions began in 2020, when a Redondo Beach-based investor bought the building for $8.25 million. After that loan was foreclosed, a Grass Valley-based real estate group paid $10.75 million for the site in 2021.
The most recent price, $6.54 million, is 39% below the prior purchase price less than two years ago.
The price erosion may hint at both a wobbly office market as well as the steadily eroding perceived value of the blighted property.
The buyer is an affiliate linked to San Jose-based Valuable Real Estate Development, which does business as Anjin Capital, according to the LinkedIn page of the company’s chief executive officer, Tianxing Wang.
The new owner of the property also obtained a loan of $6.05 million from Socotra REIT to finance the purchase. By happenstance, Socotra REIT was one of the lenders involved in a prior foreclosure attempt against the office building.
In at least two instances, a housing development was proposed on the North Winchester Boulevard property, which is an L-shaped lot that also has a frontage on Hedding Street.
Kenneth Ryan Koch, a Grass Valley resident who had owned the San Jose property through an affiliate, proposed in February 2023 a project to bulldoze the office building and replace it with 137 apartment units on the L-shaped property, documents on file with the San Jose Planning Department show.
Neither project ever broke ground and the most recent proposal was never approved by city planners.
It’s unclear what the new owner intends to do with the two-story office building, which totals 11,700 square feet.
What is clear, however, is that at least one neighbor of the property is fed up with the blight on the parcel.
“The community deserves something way better,” Dr. Tal Solomon, the principal veterinarian at Arch Veterinary Services, which operates an animal hospital next door to the office building, said in comments he emailed to this news organization in December 2022.
Dr. Solomon said multiple fires have broken out on the office building property, one of which damaged the veterinary building that he owns.
“I am so tired of dealing with this thing,” Solomon said.
