Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff made headlines earlier this year with a $100 million donation to help build the UCSF Children’s Hospital at Mission Bay. Now, he’s investing even more in the neighborhood, through a real estate deal that will bring a lot of techies into this spot that’s already got quite a few biotechies.
Salesforce (NYSE: [[ticker:CRM]]), the San Francisco-based maker of customer relationship management programs for businesses, said today it has purchased 14 acres of land in Mission Bay as part of a $278 million deal to build what could be a 2-million-square-foot global headquarters. Salesforce is buying the land from Alexandria Real Estate Equities. Salesforce and Mayor Gavin Newsom, in a joint statement, said the deal is one of the largest San Francisco land sales in years.
The new headquarters, Benioff said in a statement, “will help us continue to attract and retain talented, world-class employees. This new home for salesforce.com will provide an innovative, dynamic environment for our future growth.”
The Mission Bay district already includes a 43-acre campus for UCSF and a growing number of biotech startups, which we wrote about back in June. By moving his company to Mission Bay, Benioff will be able to keep a close eye on the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, a 289-bed integrated hospital complex being planned for the neighborhood.
Salesforce didn’t say in its statement how many people the new headquarters will be able to accommodate. The company said it had 3,969 employees heading into this year, according to its most recent annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company generated $1.3 billion in revenue in fiscal 2010, almost double its $748 million in revenue from the same period in 2008.
