[3] When Microsoft's Silicon Valley office moved to Sand Hill Road in 1988 it paid US$2.02 per square foot, less than the US$3 average for Palo Alto and Menlo Park.

The annual rent in the area around Sand Hill Road peaked at around US$144 per square foot ($1550 per m2) in mid-2000; at the time, this was higher than rates in Manhattan and London's West End.

[10] Other issues included the dated appearance of Sand Hill Road's 1.2 million square feet (110,000 m2) of "low-rise woody walk-ups, most of them built in the 1970s and ’80s", and their distance from the restaurants and stores of downtown Menlo Park and its Caltrain station.

[10] After vacancies on Sand Hill Road peaked at around 15 percent at the end of 2020, landlords responded to these issues by renovating buildings and adding amenities like farm-to-table restaurants to justify their demands for high rent.

In the second episode of HBO miniseries The Dropout, Elizabeth Holmes visits several venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road in the hopes of securing investment for Theranos.

In the 2010 film Birdemic: Shock and Terror, protagonist Rod visits a VC firm on Sand Hill Road to get financing for his solar energy startup.