There are an incredible number of Apple employees worth tens of millions of dollars that would love to not commute. The potential to rebuild a monster house on this lot next to Apple is definitely quite valuable.

Location, location, location.

>"There are an incredible number of Apple employees worth tens of millions of dollars that would love to not commute"

Is there really? Can you quantify what an "incredible number of employees" is here? Thousands, 10s of thousands? Do you have a citation for that statement?

Why would so many people worth 10s of millions of dollar be competing for the same properties/ Also why are so many people worth 10s of millions of dollars still working at Apple?

Because Apple pays most people with some amount of stock and that stock is worth 150x what it was 15 years ago.

Those (now rich) people still work at Apple, as do tens of thousands of other wealthy people.

I don't know how much jobs Apple has now but the new Campus is "huge". Like really gigantic. Apple is a wealthy tech company and even if it is not paying high salaries, I expect lots of employees have made a killing from stock options in the last few years.

Yes they have a new campus and yes Apple is rich but that does not mean their employees are rich. How do you imagine employees "made a killing"? Do you think that Apple just hands out stock grants to everyone? Company stock is an asset like anything else, why would would they just be giving it away?

Stock options are a part of the compensation especially for startups. But regular companies do it too. They do it because it is "free" money at least at the time of issue.

Apple new campus is both huge and the "flagship". It means Apple top employees will work from there. It has a 12,000 employee capacity. There will be hundreds or maybe thousands of top executives, top managers and high-grade engineers. I'm pretty sure the compensation for those is very high.

It is not "free money" at all, it is an asset like any other on the company's balance sheet.

For a publicly traded company such as Apple it wouldn't be options but RSUs and they are a percentage of you salary. And you still have to pay tax on them just like normal salary.

Just because the built a new large campus it doesn't mean that the majority of people there will be worth tens of millions of dollars. Very senior management sure, rank and file engineers - not so much.

Is apple paying these people tens of millions or are these stock programs?

You do know there is more than one company in the US right?

I think you're on to something here; usually when you see transactions that seem absurd from the outside, there is some other angle that you don't know about (like, you can rip down the existing house and build one 3x the size that you can sell for $8mm).

Or 6-7 smaller houses and sell them for ~$1m each.

Not on a 13k square foot lot!

But yeah, that has happened elsewhere in the Bay Area. (Zoning tends to prevent it, though, so there's an element of regulatory arbitrage.)

You could definitely fit that many units in a 13k square foot lot. Fitting a narrow format house on a 2k square foot lot (40x50') is plenty doable. Even more so if they have some adjoining party walls, as with townhomes.

Though as you mention, zoning may prevent it. Some areas have 5,000 s.f. minimum lot sizes.

This should be illegal. There's no good reason why you shouldn't be able to split up your 13,000 sq ft lot into smaller lots and sell those separately if you want to. Setting some reasonable state right-to-split-lots bill might go a long way to helping solve the housing crisis.

A little late response to this, but many of the minimum lot size laws are rooted in historical racism and classism to prevent people of the wrong type from being able to move in to the neighborhood. In many areas there is a lot of foot dragging to change any of it. Typically the language used to oppose it is "traffic" or "neighborhood feel."

My lot in Seattle is 1500 sq feet. You can definitely subdivide 13k into 6-7 lots if zoning allows it.

It's not 1 mile away from Apple, it is 3.5 miles away but this means nothing. There are 7 perfect school district areas in the Palo Alto, MV, Los Altos, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, West San Jose area. These places are in the center of the valley, extremely safe and best commute too.

This neighborhood is probably the 5th or 6th best here. Los Altos same house would go for 3.5M, MV there is just 0 supply, Palo Alto would be around Los Altos, Cupertino 300k more expensive, only west San Jose/Cupertino border is comparable. Apple has been here forever. They have had their hq here forever and same with their 2nd and 3rd largest offices.