Google Buys Manhattan Office/Telecom Hub 87
1sockchuck writes "Google will soon own one of the world's choice pieces of Internet real estate. The company has reportedly signed a contract to buy 111 8th Avenue in New York for an estimated $1.9 billion — or about $250 million more than Google spent to buy YouTube. The building serves as Google's main New York sales office, but is also one of the city's main telecom hotels, housing major data center operations for Digital Realty Trust, Equinix, Telx and dozens of network providers. Google currently has about 500,000 square feet of office space at 111 8th Avenue."
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I'd love to go to NYC and tour the subway. I'd love to see some of the out-of-use stations, but I don't know of/think there is any way to do that.
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^_^
NYC (Score:2)
One of the things I don't get about NY is the number of "former X" buildings/spaces. If the Port Authority needed a Bus Terminal (and a huge one at that), doesn't it need one now?
The "former meat-packing district": doesn't meat need to be packed anymore in New York City? Or do people just buy their meat unpacked?
And is everyone in NY just selling ads, suing people, or serving coffee anymore?
Same for all the other "formers".
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When the real-estate goes up in price, it makes sense to sell or rent out. You can always move your business to cheaper locations.
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$1.900.000.000 for a building (Score:1)
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They're getting more than just a building
They're getting exactly that: a building. Google is getting 100% return from it's add business, do you think they care about a 5% return from current tenants ?
At about 700$/sq feet, they are buying an 80 year old building for the same price it would have take to build it from scratch at the height of the real-estate bubble.
I can understand the're can be other reasons for wanting this, like preventing a competitor from buying it to disrupt their core business, and forcing local competitors to regroup elsewhe
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Buying a high frequency trading hub makes a few billion.
U.S. intelligence agencies trying to fund a small war via insider trading, priceless.
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Location. Building an 80 story building in Pigsknuckle, Arkansas might cost $700/ft^2, building it in Manhattan will cost a lot more that that. The piece of land it's on is incredibly valuable even if there were no building on it.
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And that's probably the point. At a certain level, many big corps are actually in the real estate business, NOT whatever nominal product. McDonald's leaps to mind... they're really in the primo location business, not the hamburger business.
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As for Project Express and High Frequency Trading http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/first-nyclondon-cable-in-a-decade-promises-sub-60ms-latency.ars [arstechnica.com] the map shows a 111 8th avenue hibernia network connection.
Somone can do a lot in the 5ms before the closest competitor gets to see the same data
Add in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A [wikipedia.org] like splitters and you have a wonderful place to set
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It's a former bus terminal so the floors in that building are very tall.
It actually used to be a Port Authority freight warehouse - not a bus terminal. Freight was transported to it via sub-street-level canals which was loaded onto trucks and driven around the floors for deposit. If look at the walls of any of the airshafts you could notice that the floors are over a foot thick of steel-reinforced concrete. It's a tank of a building.
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That building is amazing. It covers a full city block. As I recall, the elevators and hallways can handle a 40' truck trailer.
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There was a news story from September, that said they were trying to unload the building. It could have gone for anything. It was in Google's (and our) best interest, that it remain a carrier hotel.
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Investment appraisal on the back of a napkin, in a rush (family are over) so apologies for mistakes:
Initial investment: $1,900m;
Assume required rate of return (profit): 15%;
Assume 25 years of steady cash inflows;
Assume residual value of building $500m after the 25 years;
All figures before inflation (this is same as assuming cash flows move in line with inflation, so they net off).
The 15% IRR is probably a bit low for Google, but then this is probably a relatively safe investment. 25 years is probably a bi
Awesome font. (Score:1)
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The linked article http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/09/14/111-8th-avenue-carrier-hotel-is-for-sale/ [datacenterknowledge.com] ends up as dark gray on black in Chrome though .
(Guess who actually RTA?)
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Um, no it doesn't [imagehost.org]... Do you not have automatic updates on or something?
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not in Chrome 7
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Only had a gray backgrond for me on Chrome when I turned off images. Bad coding practice maybe, but that seems to be the issue.
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Having followed my own link and gone back to the page it worked as I presume it should and gave me black text on a white background.
I'm on the latest Chrome dev build (9.0.597.0) and I've not got images turned off.
I don't understand,why are some of us seeing these pages wrong sometimes - is it crappy css?
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Hmmm, I thought it was slightly darker black on black. I should get my eyes checked.
not 100% (Score:3)
Better pic (Score:2)
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Cash or low-return Google stock (Score:2)
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Or Hong Kong, London, and Singapore if I recall correctly. While the metric system has many advantages over Imperial, there are many places and industries where Imperial still reigns for borderline logical reasons.
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London is done in meters, or it was when I sold my flat there.
Re:Only Americans have square feet! (Score:5, Funny)
Well, the rest of the galaxy uses the period and wavelength of the emissions from hydrogen plasma at the critical density to define distance and time, built around a natural logarithm scale. Why don't you get with the times and use an actually universal unit of measure, pitiful human?
[Okay, i have no idea what would be a good basis, nor do I know about critical densities of hydrogen plasmas, but that seems a better standard than "the approximate length of an object that inaccurately measured a portion of a non-spherical planet based on the assumption it was a perfect sphere."]
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Wait, that's not what the meter is anymore! Now it's:
The distance light travels in some ridiculously bizarre amount of time, assuming very specific stipulations about free space and gravity, which just so happens to coincide with the approximate length of an object that inaccurately measured a portion of a non-spherical planet based on the assumption that it was a perfect sphere.
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They tried (*). It didn't stick. You're welcome to try again, though (but less blood, please).
David Gay
*: not SI, the people who gave you the meter and the kilogram well before SI came along.
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The SI unit of time is the second. Metric time hasn't taken off for a number of reasons, but the one that leaps to mind is that no matter how you define your units of time, the number of days in a year will never be a power of 10.
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Solved their problems in the building (Score:3, Interesting)
Google is hated in that building by the other tenants and has gotten a bad reputation with the management, so buying the building solves both problems. Looks like nobody's going to be saying NO to Google over at the Old Port Authority Building anymore.
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I work in that building. Not for Google. I don't hate google.
However, there was a company wide email sent on Friday where someone put in bold BOOOOOOOOOGLE while mentioning this news.
Odds are we're leaving the building entirely in 2011
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And it's "protecting your freedom" if the government does it.
Funny how quickly English is turning into a language where the actor inflects the verb. And a lot more than in most other languages I know. Depending on the actor, you could even think it comes from a completely different root...
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5000 euros/m2 (Score:3, Informative)
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I mean there is no way you could buy ANY piece of real estate for less than 10 000 euros/m2 in Paris.
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The original poster had it almost right. The building has 3 million sq feet, and Google owns 89%. Price tag: 5797 Eur / m
In the Absence of Facts (Score:2)
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way too far from wall street. speed of light counts.
Why? (Score:2)
That's puzzling. Why would Google need high-cost data center space in NYC? They're distributed enough that it doesn't matter. I could see Google buying an office building in Manhattan and filling it with advertising salespeople, but not much hardware needs to be there.
Even for Wall Street, many of the big data centers are elsewhere, usually in New Jersey.
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Maybe to be physically close to Wall Street computers.
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Maybe to be physically close to Wall Street computers.
Which, as mentioned, are all in New Jersey.
ARCA: Weehawken, NJ (to be moved to Mahwah, NJ early next year)
NYSE: Mahwah, NJ
NASDAQ: Carteret, NJ
ISE: Jersey City, NJ (to be moved to Secaucus, NJ early next year)
Direct Edge: Secaucus, NJ
CBOE C2: Secaucus, NJ
111 8th is more important for the fiber going into it. It is the place you want to be if you're a telco.
Not all in Jersey (Score:2)
Actually Wall St.'s computers are also gathered in Brooklyn.
Not just a big building, a block, in Manhattan (Score:1)
Interesting building (Score:2)
Years ago my previous employer had equipment in two different datacenters in the building. Its more than real estate, or a massive datacenter. Its a very dense internet peering hub with datacenters and office space. I can definitely see this move as strategic, as it puts Google in the "middle" of all the different players.
What does Google need with a building? (Score:2)
With almost all of its revenue coming from internet ads, what kind of sales team does Google need in Manhattan that warrants $1.9 billion?
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Those advertisements don't sell themselves. Google has a very large salesforce. Since NYC is the center of the universe for advertising (think "Madison Avenue") and magazine publishing (name just about any magazine) it is obvious that Google has a large salesforce there.
Google already rents a large part of that building and has been quoted as saying there are at leaset 2000 employees there. It's cheaper to own then rent.
Lots of valuable tennants (Score:1)
I worked in this building after WTC 9/11 attack. (Score:5, Informative)
I used to work in this building after the World Trade Center 9/11 attack when my company lost their data center and had to rent a co-location space in one of the data centers there. This is a monstrous building that is the size of an entire New York City block. It is build like an ancient Babylonia pyramid with vertical walls and a pyramidal structure on the top floors. It is across the street from the Chelsea Market and one block north of Homestead Steakhouse. The actual entrance for IT geeks to the data center space of this building is in the back on 9th avenue, the office entrance is in the front and I never used that one.
I was bored one day I took a walk down the hallways of some of the floors and saw data center spaces for _all_ of the major telecom and Internet providers that I knew of and many that I didn't know even existed. Strangely some of the doors to these data centers were left open, I'm guessing because work was being performed there and I got a tour of some of these places. Miles and miles of conduits, cables, server cages, telecom equipment racks, server racks, backup units, power distribution units, massive uninterruptable power supplies, glycol-based water cooling pipes, and tons of galvanized steel green field conduits for power lines. This was also the first place where I saw companies replacing the problematic fingerprint based scanners for vain-pattern hand scanners to beef up security. I wish I had more time to check out this amazing building but I was so busy rebuilding our company's servers after WTC that I lived within 4-rows of racks for a few months.
I spent my Christmas and New Years that year rebuilding 250 Compaq ProLiant and ~100 IBM xSeries for my old company to get their infrastructure and application servers back up. I pretty much lived in that building for 3-months and I was lucky to be able to easily walk over to the 14th St & 8th Ave L-train stop to go home late at night or in the morning. It was an interesting experience and I wished that I spent more time there to learn about that goes on in this building.
If there was one place that I know of that is the hidden center of the Internet and Information in New York City I would think that this would be the building. Luckily it was build very solid and it is very nondescript so I think that it is pretty safe. There was a rumor that the FBI had their surveillance office across the street and they had floor space with network taps in that building to be connected to all the important information pathways in NYC.
Data Center Power Off Button Incident
This was also the place where the delivery guy who just finish dropping off more parts was walking out of the data center room and hit the red button on the wall, the door opened, and he walked out. Meanwhile all we heard was a very long and deep "ooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm" sound as every single piece of equipment turned off immedietelly after the Emergency Power Off button was pressed, including the magnetic locks on the door that the guy just walked out of. Surveilence tapes showed us what happened as we stood there in deafening silence and awe unable to comprehend what just happened. The next day there was a plastic box cover over that button.
Who ever though it was a good idea to put the silver door open button next to the red power off button should have been flogged on the spot.