Medical tech titan goes on real estate shopping spree in South Bay

SANTA CLARA — A medical device titan has launched a new stage of a years-long shopping spree for Silicon Valley real estate, a buying binge during which the healthcare tech firm has spent hundreds of millions of dollars.

Intuitive Surgical has bought several properties at and near the corner of Kifer Road and Lawrence Expressway, paying a combined total of $157 million for the parcels, documents filed on Dec. 22 show.

Sunnyvale-based Intuitive bought the properties in three all-cash transactions. In each instance, the seller was

These are far from the only properties that Intuitive Surgical has bought in recent years in this vicinity, according to public real estate records.

Over five years that started in January 2017 and stretched through January 2022, Intuitive Surgical spent at least $114.3 million purchasing numerous properties in Sunnyvale, a remarkable shopping spree that has greatly widened the company’s footprint in the area.

This means that Intuitive Surgical has spent at least $271 million buying sites in Sunnyvale and Santa Clara.

Intuitive Surgical also began construction in 2022 of a huge new campus totaling 1.17 million square feet at 950 Kifer Road in Sunnyvale.

With the most recent property deals, Intuitive Surgical appears to have bought properties in Santa Clara for the first time.

While the just-bought parcels are in Santa Clara, they are still nonetheless adjacent to the Sunnyvale sites where the medical tech company is developing its new campus and had previously spent well over $100 million to buy an array of properties.

These are the Santa Clara properties that Intuitive Surgical bought in the recent deal and the amounts the medical device firm paid:

— $89.1 million for a research and office building leased to Apple on a site bounded by Kifer Road, San Ysidro Road, Tahoe Way and Semiconductor Drive.

— $78.1 million for a brand-new office building at 3655 Kifer Road next to Lawrence Expressway that totals 184,600 square feet.

— $5 million for a small building at 2999 San Ysidro Road.

The purchase also included a parking structure, county documents show.

Bayview Development Group, a veteran local real estate firm that’s active in the South Bay, sold the parcels to Intuitive Surgical. Bayview had developed the new office building at 3655 Kifer. JLL, a commercial real estate firm, has been seeking tenants to fill up the office building.

In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak and resulting business shutdowns, countless Bay Area office buildings emptied because people were obliged to work remotely or from home.

Even with the end of the lockdowns, the return to the office has proceeded at an uneven pace.

As a result, Bay Area office vacancies have increased steadily because tech companies have been shedding space at a time when they have been laying off employees in some instances.

Intuitive Surgical, whose high-profile products include a cutting-edge surgical robot, is on an expansion quest, in sharp contrast to numerous tech companies that seek to retrench.