Sun Weighs $150 Million Sale Leaseback of Burlington MA Office Campus

Boston Herald - March 10, 2007

Sun Microsystems is exploring a sale of its116-acre Burlington campus, a move that comes as the once-hot tech giant slashes jobs and scales back its local ambitions, real estate executives said.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun is weighing plans to sell the campus - a key research center which includes 700,000 square feet of office buildings - to an investor. It would then lease it back, enabling the company to cash in on a lucrative asset while relinquishing control over the real estate itself.

Sun could reap as much as $150 million from the so-called sale-leaseback, according to one real estate executive examining the deal. The site also includes untapped development sites that Sun is now not likely to use, executives said.

Sun’s real estate move comes as the company retrenches. It announced plans to cut 5,000 jobs last year. Sun made a big splash along tech-heavy Route 128 in the late 1990s, rolling out plans for a major corporate campus off Route 128 in Burlington with talk of someday employing 4,000 there. But today the number of Sun employees at its Burlington campus is roughly half that, with plans for new buildings mothballed. Sphere: Related Content