If the chip maker is looking for a downtown high-rise for its headquarters, the 380,000-square-foot Sobrato building is the only game in town.
Sobrato planned it that way when he broke ground on the 17-story tower in 2000, just as the torrid commercial real estate market had hit its peak. And he remains determined to wait for a single tenant to take the entire building. He said the 7-million-square-foot downtown office market with its 22 percent vacancy rate already has plenty of smaller spaces, including the 60,000 square feet recently vacated by Knight Ridder.
Other large spaces on the scale of the tower on Almaden Boulevard, however, do not exist in downtown San Jose.
``It's been four years since we built that thing. Our timing was awful in early 2001 -- that's when the Internet bubble burst,'' he said. ``That's been part of our problem. And it's an expensive building, but we've been willing to be aggressive on rents.''
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Once the building is leased, San Jose's downtown office vacancy would drop from 22 percent to about 15 percent, according to Ritchie Commercial. The city would gain about 1,100 employees.
``We would get a whole lot of people in that building and on the street thinking about downtown housing, and we would get retail patrons,'' she said. ``This would make downtown hum and attract other additions to our daytime and nighttime pop.''
If the deal falls through, Sobrato said he will sit tight. He has resisted so far, plus he can afford to hold out, since his company built the $100 million glass-and-granite structure with its own cash.
