Tech

Yahoo is quietly looking to sell a massive piece of land once slated for its big, expansion offices

Read in app
Marissa Mayer
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer  REUTERS/Ruben Sprich

After years of turning down potential offers, Yahoo has reportedly changed its mind and is quietly looking to sell a huge parcel of land in the Valley, Silicon Valley Journal's Nathan Donato-Weinstein reports.

This is a huge 48+-acre site in Santa Clara that Yahoo bought back in 2006 for $106 million, according to Donato-Weinstein.

Yahoo had planned to use the land to host a corporate expansion.

Meanwhile that area, not far from the new home of the San Francisco Giants' Levi's Stadium, has grown up.

So this could merely be Yahoo putting out feelers to find out how much that land could bring it if it found a buyer.

Then again, selling this land could also be a clue about Yahoo's workforce. Until Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer can find a new big hit to get the company growing again, she is under tremendous pressure from investors to manage expenses. At least one investor suggested that Yahoo needs to trim its workforce down to about 3,000 people. (That would mean laying off about 9,000 employees.) 

It's a leap to say that selling this land indicates anything that dramatic for Yahoo. However, the company did recently announce that it was killing its plan to spin off its hugely-valuable stake in Alibaba and will instead spin out its core Internet business, the part of the company where just about all of its employees work.

Meanwhile, there have been ongoing rumors that Yahoo also plans to sell itself, though its board has been denying that talk, saying the company has not decided to put itself up for sale.

Read next

Julie Bort was Business Insider's Editor at Large for the Tech team. She loves investigating stories and shedding light on the tech industry's most amazing people.Here's a small sample of some of Julie's work.Former Pinterest employees describe a traumatic workplace where managers humiliate employees until they cry, Black people feel alienated, and the toxic culture 'eats away at your soul'Sex, tequila, and a tiger: Employees inside Adam Neumann's WeWork talk about the nonstop party to attain a $100 billion dream and the messy reality that tanked itInsiders say WeWork's IT is a patchwork of cheap devices and Band-Aid fixes that will take millions to fixWeWork's toxic phone booths were created in-house by its Powered by We business70-hour weeks and 'WTF' emails: 42 employees reveal the frenzy of working at Tesla under the 'cult' of Elon MuskElon Musk works so many hours at Tesla, employees are constantly finding him asleep under tables and desksHow this woman went from a Pizza Hut employee to a founder of a $4 billion startupAn Oracle insider explains how some salespeople gamed the system to sell more cloudTHE TAKEDOWN OF TRAVIS KALANICK: The untold story of Uber's infighting, backstabbing, and multimillion-dollar exit packagesMicrosoft is in talks to buy GitHub, a startup at the center of the software world last valued at $2 billionThe alarming inside story of a failed Google acquisition, and an employee who was hospitalizedInside Facebook's plan to eat another $350 billion IT marketHow a registered sex offender wound up living in an Airbnb hosting unsuspecting guestsA controversial ex-banker is the person who really runs Twitter — and he's gambling the company's future on one risky betSecret passages and skipped meals: Oracle's CEO gave us a rare peek at what it really takes to run a $37 billion companyHP told some employees to choose between becoming contractors with no benefits or being fired without severance'I felt like we were being extorted': Customer says Oracle tried to strong-arm him into a cloud saleHow the queen of Silicon Valley is helping Google go after Amazon's most profitable businessAirbnb host: A guest is squatting in my condo and I can't get him to leaveLIES, BOOZE, AND BILLIONS: How one of the fastest-growing startups in Silicon Valley history raised $580 million then spiraled out of controlGitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart — and we have the full inside storyWhen she's not writing for Business Insider, Julie can usually be found on the trails, on my mountain bike, or on my skis, if you know where to look.