Obviously not everyone is doing as bad financially as the news might have you think. Perhaps this is best demonstrated by web giant Google who seems to have been doing a good amount of real estate investing.
We all know that Apple’s Steve Jobs did a little dabbling with real estate himself and saw the unveiling of the company’s ‘Mothership’ earlier this year. However, Google seems to be on a big real estate investing mission over the last couple of years.
Last year Google stormed the headlines with the largest real estate deal of the year, investing in a 2.9 million square foot building in NY for a whopping $1.9 billion. However, with a mushrooming workforce which has added 2,600 new employees in the last quarter alone Google continues to expand its real estate investments. This year alone Google has scooped up 15 Mountain View properties along with the new $100 million Silicon Valley office building purchase announced this week.
This is an incredibly smart strategy by Google whose many competitors continue to rent. With rents and commercial property values bound to rise for the rest of the decade Google will only continue to build equity and value while smaller players struggle with rocketing rents and overhead which will limit their resources on the tech front.
In fact we shouldn’t be surprised to see much of Google’s worth coming from its real estate investing activities in the future. This is a great sign for those considering getting into real estate investing that they are on the right track and they shouldn’t be chasing start up ideas in tech just because others have made money in it recently. If Google with all its resources for research sees real estate investing as a great move you can be sure that you are headed in the right direction too.
