FREMONT — A vast site in Fremont once occupied by a Fry’s Electronics store has been bought by a real estate investment group from the Southeast in a deal that tops $30 million.
Sterling Organization, acting through an affiliate, paid $35.7 million to buy a former Fry’s Electronics store site in Fremont, documents filed on June 17 with the Alameda County Recorder’s Office show.
A person walks toward the front entrance of a shuttered Fry’s Electronics store in Fremont, 2021. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)
Florida-based Sterling Organization is a private equity real estate firm that sometimes teams up with mega investors to buy real estate in markets nationwide, according to information posted on the company’s website.
The former Fry’s store at the just-sold property had an electricity theme and paid homage to the 1893 World’s Fair, including a Tesla coil inside the store. From time to time, a display mimicked bolts of electricity.
The seller was an entity operating as Wardenclyffe LP. By happenstance, Wardenclyffe Tower, located in New York State, was an experimental wireless transmission tower that Nikola Tesla designed and built.
Wardenclyffe LP is an affiliate that’s linked to Quality Real Estate and Richard Singer, Quality’s principal executive. For some years, Quality Real Estate was based at the same East Brokaw location where Fry’s Electronics operated its headquarters as well as a Mayan-themed store in north San Jose.
It wasn’t immediately clear from the property records whether one or more Fry’s family members were involved in the sale of the Fremont property.
The Fry’s store in Fremont, along with numerous other Fry’s retail outlets, shut its doors in 2021 as part of a sudden implosion and closure of Fry’s operations.
What is certain is that Wardenclyffe bought the property in 2000, which marked the last time the site was bought. In the 2000 transaction, the buyer and the seller crafted the deed filing in a manner to conceal the price.
The Fremont property’s assessed value in early 2023 was about $26 million. The old store remains on the property.
