What's happening at the O'Reilly complex?

Still known as the O'Reilly property, the sprawling office complex at the north end of town has had new owners since 2018 and they're now looking for new tenants

Ceres Center for Food, Youth & Community has been renting office space in the O’Reilly complex for roughly 10 years. At the end of January, Ceres announced that the owners of the complex had given them until the end of February to vacate the space—no reason given.

Almost immediately, new “For Lease” signs went up at the 7.3-acre O’Reilly Media campus on North Gravenstein Highway in Sebastopol.

The new leasing team at Sebastopol’s Artisan Sotheby’s International Realty—Eric Drew and Rosemarie Corrigan—are hoping to attract a new major technology or lifestyle company or a public institution to the campus with 80,000 square feet of office and warehouse space.

The complex of three, high-dormered, three-story buildings was originally built in 2001 as the main headquarters for O’Reilly Media, a computer book publisher and conference organizer that today is an online learning platform for technical and professional skills.

“The property offers a great combination of location, culture and community,” said leasing broker Eric Drew of Artisan Sotheby’s. “It’s all the same reasons Tim O’Reilly moved his company here from Massachusetts all those years ago, instead of locating in Silicon Valley.”

A brief history of the property

Tim O’Reilly, Dale Dougherty (now the co-owner of the Sebastopol Times) and other original O’Reilly & Associates team members relocated from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a leased space on Petaluma Avenue in Sebastopol in 1989. They moved to Morris Street in the early nineties, then made plans to build a sprawling new headquarters at the north end of town. Their proposal for what was to become the O’Reilly complex was met with loud local opposition about the project’s size and potential impact on Sebastopol’s small-town charm.

After formal citizen-group challenges in front of the city’s planning commission and a threatened land use lawsuit, the O’Reilly project won eventual approval after some project design compromises that included additional tree plantings at the front of the property and the resulting steep-peaked and dormered profile of the buildings. At the time, O’Reilly Media employed about 160 people, not all located in Sebastopol.

The Sebastopol Chamber of Commerce had honored O’Reilly & Associates as the Business of the Year in 1995, and a lead editorial in Sonoma West Times & News in October 1996 urged the City Council to approve the new O’Reilly project on Gravenstein Highway North as a “signature project of the positive economic effects and expanded possibilities” represented by the company.

O’Reilly Media sold the O’Reilly complex and the two undeveloped lots behind it in 2018 to a Southern California real estate company, H1 Real Estate. O’Reilly kept some offices there, but over the years, it greatly reduced its employee base in Sebastopol. O’Reilly has also been subleasing some of the office suites to a variety of tenants, including some pro bono arrangements with local nonprofits, Ceres not among them. Ceres was paying rent.

Over the last few years, the mostly empty parking lot and lack of other activity have been the source of much drive-by curiosity. Now, the new “For Lease” signs have set off a new round of questions.

What kind of business is the owner looking for?

Drew said some ideal candidates for the former O’Reilly campus might come from the regional “ag, wine and tech industries.” Looking at longer-term options, he said the campus-like property could serve local or regional government or educational institutions, like the SRJC, a culinary institute or satellite government offices.

Two of the buildings are designed as office spaces, with group meeting rooms, employee services, customer lobbies and flexible floorplans. Total office space is 83,274 square-feet that Drew said can be sublet to as little as 10,000 square feet to new tenants. The northernmost building is a 6,996 square-foot warehouse.

Commercial real estate in California has been in the doldrums for the last few years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and increases in lending rates, but according to a few recent news articles in local media, Sonoma County’s commercial property real estate market has picked up recently.

“I don’t want to mislead anybody,” said Drew, “but someone could lease our property really cheap” if they took the entire square footage “as is.”

He said current interest in office space is “still a little weak,” but warehouse space is “almost a hot market.”

Drew said the new large blue “For Lease” signs facing Gravenstein Highway at the property are meant to serve two markets. “Who wants space right now is part of what we’re aiming at,” Drew said, adding, “We’re also looking to plant seeds for businesses that might be planning for space over the next year or longer.”

The property is zoned OLM for office or light industrial uses. The legal address is 1003-1005 Gravenstein Highway North.

What’s happening with The Canopy, the development just behind the O’Reilly campus?

The new signage on 116 has caused some confusion around town about the status of The Canopy project, an 80-unit townhome condominium development located on 6.1 acres behind the O’Reilly complex. City Ventures is now developing The Canopy, which has been approved by the city. The rental of the O’Reilly Complex will have no effect on that development, which is going ahead on schedule. When City Ventures got its final approval for Canopy from the city last year, City Ventures’ Executive Vice President of Development Samantha Hauser told the Sebastopol Times that they expected to begin construction this spring.

The Sebastopol Times also reached out to Craig Atkins, co-chairman of the board of City Ventures and the owner of H1 Real Estate, which owns the O’Reilly complex, for a comment about his vision for the future of the complex. We never heard back from him.

And what about Ceres?

Ceres meanwhile is preparing to move out of its offices at O’Reilly by the end of the month. According to Deborah Ramelli, Cere’s Director of Development & Community Affairs, “These offices house our admin staff, who will primarily be working from home until our new building, The Center for Food, Youth & Community, completes construction and is ready to occupy late this year. We have leased a small office near the new building to support essential administrative functions.”