Fry’s collapse opens prime real estate in the Bay Area
SAN JOSE >> The collapse of Fry’s Electronics, which closed all of its stores this week, suddenly frees up 65 acres of real estate in prime locations.
San Jose, Fremont, Concord, Campbell, Sunnyvale, and Palo Alto all contain former Fry’s Electronics store sites, some of them sitting on huge parcels.
“These properties will help generate new buildings and new development,” said Dave Sandlin, an executive vice president with Colliers International, a commercial real estate firm.
Tech campuses, housing, auto dealerships, research, manufacturing — almost anything other than bigbox retail — are among the kinds of projects that have been proposed, could be feasible or are on a community’s wish list for the properties.
“You could see developers or various users like tech companies going after these sites,” said Edward Del Beccaro, an executive vice president with TRI Commercial/corfac International, a commercial real estate firm.
At the north San Jose site on East Brokaw Road, city planners already are reviewing a proposal for a tech campus of seven modern office buildings that could total 2 million square feet.
What happens to the sites could be a process months or years in the making. Plus, the ultimate disposition of the properties could depend in part on what or who owns the sites.
The San Jose and the Fremont properties appear to be controlled by one or more members of the closeknit quartet that owned Fry’s Electronics.
Officially, and on paper, each of the six properties has a different owner:
• San Jose, 550 E. Brokaw Road, owned by Caracol Property Owner LLC, totals 19.7 acres. Caracol operates out of 600 E. Brokaw Road, which is the corporate headquarters of Fry’s Electronics. The Fry’s store there features a Mayan theme — and El Caracol is an observatory in the ancient Mayan settlement at Chichen Itza in Mexico. The assessed value is $20 million.
• Fremont, Osgood Road, owned by Wardenclyffe LLC, totals 10.1 acres. Wardenclyffe operates out of the 600 E. Brokaw address in San Jose. The Fremont store has a motif inspired by famed inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla — who designed and built an experimental wireless transmission tower on Long Island called Wardenclyffe Tower. The assessed value is $23.9 million.
• Campbell, 600 E. Hamilton Ave., 3.9 acres. F & F Campbell, which appears to be a group headed by local residents Roberta Feuerstein and Elliot Feuerstein, is the owner. The assessed value is $11.3 million.
• Sunnyvale, 1077 E. Arques Road, 13.6 acres. Wise Property Trust, a group affiliated with the family of Robert E. Wise, a high-profile film director, owns the site. The assessed value is $11.3 million.
• Concord, 1695 Willow Pass Road, 5.6 acres. Linsong LLC, headed by Ifong Lin of Redwood City, is the owner. The assessed value is $20.2 million.
• Palo Alto, 3200 Park Road, 12.5 acres. SI 45, an affiliate controlled by developer Sobrato Interests, is the owner. The assessed value is $73.7 million.
“The Palo Alto site can easily be a tech campus,” Sandlin said. “Palo Alto is a fantastic site. It is near Stanford University and Stanford Research Park.”
Townhomes, beer gardens, apartment complexes, small office spaces, local retail, creative labs, and micro-manufacturing sites have all been touted by community groups and local officials as potential future uses of the Palo Alto property. Sobrato says it’s not interested in residential development.
The Concord property is across the street from an auto row.
“A lot of dealerships might want that property,” Del Beccaro said. “It’s got freeway visibility and is a few blocks from an interchange.”
The Fremont site could be well-suited for a tech campus, because of its size, if the former store site is bulldozed.
“You can easily build a million square feet on the Fremont property,” Del Beccaro said.
But the store building in Fremont could also be attractive enough in its current state that it could escape the wrecking ball.
“That Fremont building was constructed in a very similar way to how these advanced manufacturing buildings are being built right now,” Sandlin said. “Without a lot of additional capital, that could be rented for a significant amount of money.”
Similarly, the Campbell building could survive and become the site of a research and development operation, Sandlin suggested.
SAN JOSE >> The iconic Fry’s Electronics, a destination for geeks before the world turned geeky, ended a 36year run Feb. 24 and closed all of its stores.
A Bay Area institution that opened its first store in Sunnyvale in 1985, Fry’s quickly became a shopping and cultural destination, with themed stores that sold everything from candy to routers to refrigerators, cameras and computers.
“For Silicon Valley engineers, Fry’s was the goto place,” said Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with Campbell-based Creative Strategies, which tracks the tech sector. “Tech engineers went there not only to buy electronics but also to get snacks.”
In a statement on its website, the San Jose-based company blamed the shutdown of its 31 stores in nine states on the challenges of the pandemic and changes in the retail industry. The company was hit hard when customers began rejecting brick-and-mortar outlets for shopping online.
Fry’s executives did not return phone calls seeking additional comment.
The company’s struggles have been widely telegraphed. Customers complained of bare shelves, and stores began closing. The Western-themed Palo Alto store closed in late 2019 and the Campbell store with an Egyptian pyramid theme closed in November.
At the time of the closing announcement, Fry’s had Bay Area stores in San Jose, Sunnyvale, Fremont and Concord.
When Brian King, a video producer for an autonomous car company, moved to the Bay Area five years ago and started working at a technology firm, he was immediately ushered to a store he knew well from his time in Southern California.
“One of my managers just drove me to Fry’s and said, ‘Buy what you need. Get your cables, get your keyboard, let’s get you working.’ ”
It was Fry’s in Burbank where King had bought the materials to make his first PC, a “Hackintosh,” he said.
“It fostered people’s interest to build things,” said King, 35, of Redwood City. “You could go to Fry’s with your allowance and get these parts, get the tools and ride your bike home with them. People would go to Fry’s to buy a soldering iron and to buy materials for do-it-yourself tech.”
The company was founded by three brothers, John, Randy and David Fry, who started working in their father’s grocery business, Fry’s Food Stores. The brothers were joined by Kathryn Kolder, who worked for a company that had sold PCS to the grocery business. They created stores that quickly became quirky go-to places with a wide selection and low prices.
Bill Arnold, a Portola Valley resident who frequented Fry’s stores, believes the retailer played a significant role in the evolution of the Silicon Valley tech sector.
“Fry’s was a techie heaven in its heyday,” said Arnold, who frequently bought ethernet cables at Fry’s, but always avoided the temptation of buying a computer. “It was like having an old-style corner drugstore, but one that was for electronics.”
At one point, revenues at
Fry’s were robust enough that the company made Forbes’ list of the largest privately held companies in the United States, ranked by revenue. Forbes estimated that Fry’s generated $2.3 billion in revenue during 2018. By 2020, Fry’s had dropped off the list.
Bajarin and Arnold both said that Fry’s was so influential in its peak years that executives with tech, consumer electronics and computer companies beat a path to Fry’s headquarters, hoping to get their products sold at the stores.
“The people behind the products would line up around the block at the corporate offices to try to convince the Fry’s executives to place their products on the store shelves,” Arnold said. “They knew that if they got the product into Fry’s that it would sell.”
The company would host executives at a golf course called The Institute, built by John Fry in Morgan Hill, Bajarin said. It is so exclusive and secretive that the Golf Pro Now website referred
Contact George Avalos at 408-859-5167 and Ethan Baron at 408-920-5011.