SAN JOSE — A San Jose office building near the city’s mega malls has been seized by its lender, ending a saga of financial woes for a site that became an eyesore for which multiple housing projects were floated and then flopped.
The building, located at 826 North Winchester Boulevard just north of Westfield Valley Fair and Santana Row, had veered in and out of foreclosure proceedings before finally being seized by the lender for the property.
The site has now been foreclosed upon twice by different lenders but not before it became a rundown building scarred by graffiti that neighbors perceived as an eyesore.
“The community deserves something way better,” Dr. Tal Solomon, the principal veterinarian at Arch Veterinary Services, which operates an animal hospital next door to the office building, said in comments he emailed to this news organization.
Solomon also thinks the empty building poses a hazard to his business. Solomon also owns the building where the veterinary center operates.
“We have had several fires in the last few months, one of which damaged the vet hospital,” Solomon said.
Emerson Vista, the lender for the delinquent mortgage, is now the owner of the building, which the financier seized after filing a default notice against the property.
Kenneth Ryan Koch, a Grass Valley resident who had owned the San Jose property through an affiliate, proposed in February 2023 a project to bulldoze the office building and replace it with 137 apartment units on the L-shaped property, documents on file with the San Jose Planning Department show.
Nothing on file with city officials shows that the housing development plans advanced much beyond a preliminary filing, however.
The Winchester Boulevard property is just the latest real estate failure to haunt Koch.
A Koch-led affiliate lost two Los Gatos properties to a foreclosure seizure in a separate real estate proceeding.
On Jan. 25, two downtown Los Gatos commercial properties that Koch had owned through a different affiliate were seized by the lender for those sites in an auction to foreclose a $7 million loan.
Regarding the Winchester Boulevard office building site in San Jose, Emerson Vista completed the foreclosure on June 29, documents on file with the Santa Clara County Recorder’s Office show.
That was the second attempt to build housing on the site, including one by a group that owned the site before Koch — which also suffered a foreclosure on a delinquent loan.
It’s unclear what Emerson Vista intends to accomplish with the site now that the lender owns it. Lenders typically attempt to quickly find a buyer for their foreclosed properties.
Solomon believes that housing proposals for the property have failed because the unusual L-shape of the parcel and the site’s small size tend to render new development less viable.
“I am so tired of dealing with this thing,” Solomon said. “I want to buy and demolish it.”
