An empty lot or building can inspire confidence and an expectation of growth. It can also be an embarrassment, however, and that’s what a 50-acre site in Santa Clara has become for Yahoo.
Yahoo bought the land in July of 2006 for a supposed price of $50 million. Fine, whatever – we won’t use that point to debate real estate prices or even the company’s financial wellbeing. But Katherine Conrad reports, “Eighteen months later – despite Yahoo’s promise to reveal its strategy within a year – the city hasn
‘t heard a word from the company about construction plans.”
And that’s a fact that invites all sorts of discussion. First, for the sake of anyone who has to walk by the place, one can only hope that Yahoo hired a lawn care team. It’s also interesting, though, to consider how the situation might relate to the company’s slide.
Think about it: what sort of poor planning allows money to get sunk into a property for which there’s no future? Why didn’t Yahoo try to cut its losses through a resale as the one-year deadline passed? And why, even after the real estate market tanked, didn’t Yahoo unload this land before firing 1,000 employees?
We’ve written a number of stories about Google’s expansions, and Conrad makes a case that Microsoft has done well in that respect, too. Not that anyone was wondering, anyway, but it’s easy to see how Yahoo wound up at the mercy of both of them.
