Silicon Valley is Back in Business and Stronger Than Ever

2001 SPELLED DOOMSDAY FOR SILICON VALLEY
After 9-11 hit in 2001, the high-tech companies that were once the dominant industry in the stock market went belly-up overnight. This tragedy affected the real estate market in the Silicon Valley area in Northern California like no other event before or since.

Some of the major office buildings that were being built for future tenants had all of the major hardware in place that would allow these ultra high-tech companies to come in and immediately start building up their company's net worth using T-1 connections, hundreds of high-fiber digital phone lines and internet servers that were capable of handling millions of computer software transactions.

Those buildings have since been left standing unoccupied for the past six years just waiting for the day to come when the dot com industry would finally recover. It appears that this time has come today, as one of the biggest office buildings in Silicon Valley has finally been filled by a major industry player.

BEA SYSTEMS BOUGHT THEMSELVES A $100 MILLION BUILDING
It looked like this year would bring more doom and gloom to the business partners at Sobrato Development Companies, who owned this $100 million, 17 floor industrial building when Nvidia, the graphic chips maker, backed out of buying the enormous building last November. But then, in February of this year, BEA Systems coughed up more than $135 million that they intend to use for their own business, not even needing to rent out any of the building's other floors to recoup their investment.

OTHER MAJOR TECH COMPANIES MOVING IN TO SILICON VALLEY BY THE BOATLOAD
Just in the last year alone, Apple, Yahoo!, and Google have sunk more than $400 million in massive real estate purchases in the Valley, where they plan to build business campuses and major headquarters for all of their main California branches. Cisco Systems also have added a thousand new employees to their main Silicon Valley site and plan to buy more property surrounding their headquarters so they can expand their already huge industrial complex.

The entire Silicon Valley economy is growing in leaps and bounds as the economic upswing in the area is being led by the clean air industry, biotechnology industry and new media which is adding more and more jobs to their employment base at an unprecedented rate. The number of new jobs in the area was over 25,000 which is the biggest annual upswing in job rates since 2001.

EVEN A PESSIMIST HAS LITTLE TO COMPLAIN ABOUT REGARDING THIS NEW GROWTH PATTERN
The restaurants in the area have started filling up again every night, and the traffic has gotten a lot worse as the new jobs have created a bigger influx of commuters on a daily basis, but that's the only downside to this great new growth pattern that can only have a positive effect on America's economy overall. Even in the high crime area of East Palo Alto, a new Four Seasons hotel has recently opened, a sure sign that this economic growth is really affecting Silicon Valley for the better.

Real estate investors are relishing this economic upturn as the vacancy levels have gone down in all areas of Silicon Valley which means the rent will increase every month on these new giant industrial buildings and condominum rentals. With this new job growth along with companies like Google continuing to exand their company ownership to include buying internet behemoths like MySpace, the Silicon Valley's future looks rosy indeed.