Putting aside the wisdom of buying residential land for development at this time, there are a couple things that come to mind. The seller for both parcels is the same entity, and the sale price for the Atherton land is said to have been negotiated at some point prior to 2004. It’s possible that the saleprices for the two transactions involve some reallocation between the two parcels for some reason.
It’s also possible that they sold with different levels of entitlements – one may have already had a recorded map and the other may have owed some fees and bonds and such.
When looking at these transactions from the outside it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on without interviewing one of the principals to the sale, and both sales were apparently handled in house without the use of outside brokers. So basically, good luck in finding out anything at all.
To make matters just a little more confusing, the parcel that sold in 10/2005 has another sale listed on it from 11/17/2005 for $21,000,000, and I found yet another transcation attributed to this site on 10/05/2005 for $36,000,000. Offhand, I’d say the 161 acres has been split into at least 2 and possibly 3 smaller parcels and it’s possible your numbers on the 10/2005 sale are off. Richmond might be using part of the 12/2005 sale land in with their portion of the 10/2005 sale land to build the larger project.
Or you could possibly have it reversed and they may be building the Luminara project on the $31,000,000 parcel and the Atherton project on the $23,680,000 parcel.
Truth is, I don’t know what the answer is – I’m just throwing a couple random thoughts out.
