Silicon Valley One - Fall 2008 - (Page 17)

Silicon Valley may be a land where ideas and innovation flit invisibly across circuits and wires, but it’s also a place that hundreds of high-tech companies call home. Few people have had a bigger role in creating the structures that contain these world-shaping companies than John A. Sobrato, whose real estate career dates back almost a half-century. He began selling residential real estate while attending the University of Santa Clara (now Santa Clara University). Upon graduation, he began working with his mother, Ann, developing industrial and office buildings for the area’s emerging electronics industry. It was the early 1960s, and local fruit orchards outnumbered office parks. In 1978, he founded Sobrato Development Companies (now The Sobrato Organization). He has become one of the great real estate developers in Silicon Valley, and he has built huge corporate campuses for Apple and NVIDIA, among many clients. Today, the company controls nearly 8 million square feet of office space across 86 commercial properties in Silicon Valley, owns more than 400 acres of land throughout Santa Clara and Alameda counties, and owns 7,900 apartment units. Sobrato is also a generous philanthropist. The Sobrato Family Foundation (www.sobrato.org) has donated more than $300 million in local real estate. For example, this spring, it opened a 104,000-square-foot office building in San José dedicated to providing free rent for eight major nonprofit agencies such as United Way and Valley Medical Center. In 2002, the foundation opened a rent-free campus in Milpitas, which 32 smaller charities now call home. Sobrato recently met with Silicon Valley Community Foundation CEO Emmett D. Carson and ONE contributor James Daly at Sobrato’s home in Atherton. local agencies; about 125 nonprofits are part of our various grant cycles. Most of these provide basic services for emotionally, economically or physically challenged folks to try to improve their quality of life. You have been one of the premier builders of Silicon Valley. How has the area transformed for real estate agents? It’s far more competitive now. In the early days, there were very few developers. When I first started working with my mother in the development side, I was also selling real estate. At that time, my mother was dabbling a little bit in industrial development. So in addition to selling houses, I worked with her. My mother had created a building for Kaiser Electronics, which I think was one of the only hightech companies in Palo Alto at the time. I remember going over there when I was about 13, working with the carpenters. In those days, there were only about three or four developers in Silicon Valley. Today, we have hundreds of competitors. Family clearly is important to you. What has been the role of your family in terms of success and growth? A family business can be very difficult, but if your family is involved, you also have a real vested interest to work hard. It’s about trust. It’s about tradition. A lot of your gifts come in the form of real estate and buildings. Why is that your preferred method of giving? We want to be philanthropic in the most tax-efficient manner possible. So, we have buildings that we built 20 to 30 years ago that we, in turn, contributed to the community foundation. Reason being, we can get a deduction for the full current fair market value of the real estate if we donate through the community foundation. Should I donate the building to our private Sobrato Family Foundation, we only get a deduction for the original cost adjusted for depreciation. If you have a real estate asset that you sell first and then give the cash to a nonprofit, you have to pay income tax on the difference between your original cost and the depreciation recapture innovation through philanthropy Why is it important for you and your family to give back to the Silicon Valley community? This is where we made our success, so we feel it’s important to return some of that to the communities where it happened. So instead of getting involved with worldwide hunger, for instance, and some of the other really good causes that are out there, we just want to make Silicon Valley as good a place to live as possible. Our resources have been focused on RobeRt HouseR o n e 17 http://www.sobrato.org

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Silicon Valley One - Fall 2008 Contents From Emmett D. Carson The New Face of Need Five-star Philanthropy Ready to Learn Board School Civic Citizens Built to Last siliconvalleycf.org What If?

Silicon Valley One - Fall 2008

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