Google has entered into a long-term lease agreement for the former Mayfield Mall building in Mountain View, California, which is being redeveloped into an office complex for the second time in its history. agency reports this Bloomberg .
The agreement was signed with Rockwood Capital and Four Corners Properties, whose joint venture owns the shopping center and is engaged in its redevelopment. The terms and conditions of the lease were not disclosed. In terms of the volume of leased space, the deal is the largest in Silicon Valley this year.
Completion of construction work at Mayfield Mall is scheduled for 2014. Upon completion, 46.5 thousand square meters of office space will appear on a plot of 11.2 hectares. The new complex will be located near Google's main headquarters.
As the Silicon Valley Business Journal notes, Mayfield Mall, which opened in 1966, was the first indoor shopping mall in California to be equipped with air conditioning. In 1983, the shopping center closed, and three years later the property was acquired by Hewlett-Packard, which rebuilt it for offices for the first time. After Hewlett-Packard moved out of the building in 2003, it sat in disrepair.
Rockwood Capital and Four Corners Properties bought Mayfield Mall in 2012 for about $90 million and renamed it San Antonio Station.
Examples of converting shopping centers into offices have been found in the United States before. In particular, the IT company Rackspace Hosting bought the abandoned Windsor Park Mall shopping center (111.5 thousand square meters) in San Antonio for $32.7 million and then rebuilt it into a business center.

Google will house employees in a former shopping center