Most Expensive Office Spaces: Sand Hill Road Named Priciest Commercial Real Estate In North America (PHOTOS)

Not only does a certain Menlo Park street have more expensive office space than even downtown San Francisco's toniest digs, but it's the home of the priciest commercial real estate in all of North America.

(SCROLL DOWN FOR PHOTOS)

The real estate services firm Jones Lang LaSalle has released its list of the most expensive streets in the United States and Canada to rent office space and the winner, far and away, is Sand Hill Road.

You wouldn't know it by looking at the nondescript office parks framing the tree-lined boulevard perched on the edge of the Stanford campus, but Sand Hill Road is the de facto hub for the venture capital firms that have fueled Silicon Valley's tech revolution for decades. Rent there averages $114 per square foot and tops out just shy of $200.

The San Francisco Business Times reports:

The initial attraction of the site was simple. Few other places in the world boast immediate proximity to a top-notch freeway (the scenic and relatively uncontested Highway 280), ultra-exclusive residential areas (adjacent Atherton and Woodside), a leading research institution (Stanford), a nearby cultural center (San Francisco) and a booming industrial corridor (Silicon Valley).

Sand Hill Road beat out Manhattan's Fifth Avenue at $97 per square foot and hedge fund hotbed Greenwich, Conn., at $90 per square foot.

Coming in fourth was another local tech center, Palo Alto's nearby University Avenue (where Facebook is headquartered), which averages $83.16 per square foot.

The most expensive addresses in San Francisco were on California Street, which includes the iconic Bank of America building, with those averaging $43.16 per square foot.

"Rents for office space in these streets were almost 90 percent higher than the average rents in the same metropolitan area," Jones Lang LaSalle Senior Vice President John Sikaitis told the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal. "Location is everything in real estate and this study proves it."

The entire list is available here.

Take a look at the most expensive places for commercial real estate below:

CORRECTION: This article originally identified Sand Hill Road as in Palo Alto. It's in Menlo Park.

Comments

[mark weiss86]

04:02 AM on 09/14/2011

worse than that they have proposed to turn the historic and beloved Varsity Theatre in Palo Alto, 456 University, into office space, which is like putting dams in Grand Canyon or flooding Sistine Chapel to let tourists get a better look at the ceiling as Howard Gossage once said.

[tnash26170]

07:17 PM on 09/12/2011

I own 82 acres in NE Oregon and I price it at $225 per square foot. Right next to Highway 86, with very little traffic. Elk deer and birds abound. Beautiful view of the Wallowa Mtns. Lot of snow in Winter so I can XC from my porch. What the Hell has Frisco to offer? Some overpriced joke of a restaurant?

[Dale720240]

12:50 PM on 09/10/2011

Facebook is not on University Avenue.

[studioh!]

11:37 AM on 09/10/2011

Avenue of the Stars, although tragically named, is in Century City while the photo shows the downtown LA skyline. It should be so simple to get stock photos these days... to go with schlock reporting.

[Carl Rosenberg]

10:59 PM on 09/09/2011

Well that is pretty lame. Sand Hill Road is in Menlo Park. Completely, totally, and utterly. Palo Alto is one town, then there os 8,000 acres of Stanford, and on the other side, there is this completely different town called Menlo Park. Hire some writers that do that thing called "investigative journalism".

[Chris Cappiello]

12:08 AM on 09/10/2011

Investigative Journalist? Are those those people that spend 5 hours a day catching up on various blogs?

[Dorothy Falcon]

11:17 AM on 10/06/2011

Really interesting info. For comparison, here's another article I found on the same topic, The Five Most Expensive Office Spaces in America http://bit.ly/rnzKYG

[Hope Springs 2012]

10:30 PM on 09/09/2011

We had an office there back in 1988. Meanwhile, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) is on Sand Hill Road. Don't tell the Tea Party (whose members hate science) or they'll shut it down, sell the site to the Venture Capitalists and turn the accelerator into a gun range. :-)

[Chris Cappiello]

12:33 AM on 09/10/2011

... Exactly how much of a boom could you make if you shot a proton at near light speeds into glass bottles? I like where this particle accelerator shooting range idea is going...

[elocin277]

08:36 PM on 09/09/2011

There's no Upper "Walter" Street in Halifax, but there is an Upper "Water" Street. Come on, guys. Really?

[formerroadie]

08:20 PM on 09/09/2011

People would pay that much to come to crappy Texas? No wonder our country is so backwards.

[Cacey]

07:45 PM on 09/09/2011

The San Francisco Bay Area, still the greatest place for business and personal success. Let the hamberger makers move to Texas.

[skyslimit]

03:46 AM on 09/10/2011

Gotta love those blue state liberals!

[tnash26170]

07:19 PM on 09/12/2011

The city? Who the Hell wants to live in a city? Pavement everywhere, traffic, everything overpriced, SF is the most overrated place in North America.