SAN JOSE — The owner of San Jose’s Santana Row is seeing optimistic signs for the company’s retail, restaurant, office and housing business — including stability for the Silicon Valley economy — as tech layoffs start to fade.
The encouraging outlook includes the iconic Santana Row mixed-use complex, executives with Federal Realty Investment Trust, said during a conference call with Wall Street analysts to discuss the company’s second-quarter financial results. Federal Realty is the principal owner and developer of Santana Row.
“It feels like Silicon Valley is stabilizing,” Donald Wood, Federal Realty’s chief executive officer, said Wednesday during the conference call.
The hopeful signs have emerged primarily because the pace of tech layoffs has dramatically decreased in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, according to Wood.
The improving picture for the tech industry and high-tech jobs has also brightened the prospects for the brand-new but empty One Santana West office building that Federal Realty has developed at 3155 Olsen Drive in San Jose, on the west side of Winchester Boulevard across the street from Santana Row.
Tenant inquiries and tours have hopped higher for One Santana West, according to Wood. The office building totals 375,000 square feet.
“We are in some earnest and frankly advanced negotiations with tenants that ware looking at our space” at One Santana West, Wood said during the conference call. “I’m pretty confident we will have some leasing success in the relatively near future” at the new office building, Wood added.
During 2022 and so far in 2023, tech companies have revealed plans to cut slightly more than 26,500 jobs in the Bay Area, according to this news organization’s analysis of the official WARN notices received by the state Employment Development Department.
Over the first seven months of 2023, tech companies have announced plans to eliminate about 16,100 jobs in the Bay Area.
But in a potentially positive trend, 10,100 of those occurred in the first three months of 2023. During the April-through-June second quarter, tech companies cut a much smaller number — about 5,200 Bay Area jobs.
This has translated into a sense, at least for the Santana Row and One Santana West owners, that the worst is over in Silicon Valley in terms of layoffs.
“It feels palpably different,” Wood said. “There is a stabilization happening in Silicon Valley.”