El Camino Health buys San Jose medical office from Sobrato

El Camino Health has gone from renter to owner of a medical office building in San Jose, acquiring the 35,000-square-foot property from The Sobrato Organization for $19.5 million.

The healthcare system paid about $552 a square foot to purchase the two-story building at 625 Lincoln Avenue, according to a news release from CBRE, which represented Mountain View-based Sobrato in the deal. El Camino Health had been renting the property from Sobrato before the sale, using it as an urgent and primary care clinic. Completed in 1998, the site is one of 13 locations operated by the care provider in Santa Clara County, the release said. The Mercury News earlier reported the deal.

Sobrato’s name has appeared in the news several times in recent months. Although this sale seems relatively nondescript, it’s the latest in a flurry of deals and milestones for the family-owned firm during that time. In May, its real estate and development arm paid $71 million, or $1,731 a square foot, to acquire an Andreesen Horowitz-leased office building in San Francisco. Two months later, it announced the departure of Rob Hollister, head of Sobrato’s real estate and development group for nearly a decade. Hollister left the firm the same week it got Mountain View’s approval to build a 102,000-square-foot office building at 590 Castro Street.

Between the announcement of Hollister’s departure and the project’s approval, the Sobrato Family Foundation sold the site of an entitled townhome development in Sunnyvale to homebuilder PulteGroup for $52 million. The foundation is the main grant-making vehicle of the firm’s philanthropic arm.

El Camino Health, meantime, brought on a new chief operating officer last month and is in the process of bringing a 52-bed hospital to Sunnyvale. The facility would be used exclusively for inpatient rehab and is slated to open in 2024, the care provider said last October. It already operates two nonprofit, acute care campuses in Mountain View and Los Gatos and various primary, urgent, and specialty care clinics spread across Santa Clara County.

— Matt Niksa

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