The owners of a Silicon Valley car dealership want to redevelop their property with apartments. Nothing new right? Except the Toyota dealership would stay.
Price Simms Auto Group wants to build an 88-unit apartment building with their Sunnyvale Toyota dealership on the ground floor, according to Fast Company. The apartments would essentially subsidize the dealership, allowing the firm to stay in a pricey market.
“The single-story model of a showroom, a service department, and a display lot is becoming cost prohibitive, even for some of the best brands in America,” said Price Simms co-founder Adam Simms. “So it forces us to think about how we maintain a presence in these expensive markets where there’s a lot of car business to be had and still make the economics work at the dealership level.”
Simms said that his company is planning to do the same with two or three other dealerships it owns, according to the report. He called it a necessity turned into an opportunity given the rising land values in the Bay Area, where housing is in short supply.
The pandemic has driven down demand for apartments in San Francisco proper, but the wider region remains one of the country’s most expensive places to buy and rent a home.
In renderings, the Price Simms project looks a lot like the countless mixed-use apartment buildings designed and built over the last decade in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco. But instead of the usual ground-floor grocery store or coffee shop, the space would be occupied by rows of shiny new Camrys, Corollas, RAV4s and maybe even Supras. Dahlin Group Architecture Planning is designing the new building
[FC] — Dennis Lynch
The post Keys to car and castle: Silicon Valley Toyota dealer wants to build apartments above appeared first on The Real Deal Los Angeles.
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