Sereno Group Los Altos’ sales manager Owen Halliday gave the Town Crier a tour of the company’s new offices at 467 First St. last week, which employees moved into at the beginning of the month despite some ongoing construction.
Halliday said he was excited about the move from the 369 S. San Antonio Road office, where the Los Altos team was based for 10 years, because he and his agents had outgrown the space. The original move-in date was in March, he noted, but the schedule was delayed to meet building requirements.
When Sereno Group moved into its old office in 2008, the company was largely starting out in a slow market, but somehow, according to Halliday, expertise kept them afloat.
Sereno Group occupies the second and third floors of the new building, owned by Sean and Erik Corrigan‘s Southgate Partners LLC, and two other tenants will share the first floor. Halliday said he doesn’t know who those tenants might be, but they won’t include another real estate company.
It’s a possibility that tenants haven’t yet been secured, as suites 100 and 101 appear for lease under property search results for West Coast commercial real estate firm Kidder Mathews‘ First Vice President Erik Corrigan.
SUSTAINABLE DESIGN
467 First boasts all the bells and whistles: client parking out front and safe, gated parking for employees underground; skylights; an outdoor patio with a grill for work and play; open workspaces for agents from other offices; and even a large conference room that Halliday hopes will be used by community groups.
Modern touches appear throughout, including industrial ceilings and a “living art” wall featuring succulents in the second-floor workspace. Halliday praised the architecture firm that handled the project, the Palo-Alto based Hayes Group.
The design is environmentally friendly, with wood slats running along the backside of the building that help either to trap the heat to cool down the offices in the summer or push it through to warm them up in the winter.
Sereno Group’s agents are aiming to be as green-minded as their workspace, which means eliminating use of plastic bottles and paper products as well as taking the stairs between floors when possible.
“We figured out that this will also put us all in good shape,” Halliday joked after noting that an agent calculated that going up and down each step burned half a calorie.
The company has planned an opening for employees Thursday, but the housewarming for the public won’t take place until later this year due to ongoing improvements on the second floor. Construction – by South Bay Construction of Campbell – currently limits the company to using only a portion of that level. South Bay, a 40-year-old business, has become a local fixture after its work on Adobe Animal Hospital in Los Altos and the 23andMe headquarters in Mountain View.
Sereno Group will occupy 12,000 of the 17,000 square feet of office space at 467 First once construction wraps up, nearly four times the size of the company’s previous digs.
For more information, visit serenogroup.com/offices/los-altos.
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