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BANGALORE: Companies founded by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos may be the biggest employers in Seattle, but SD Shibulal is a person of no mean influence in the home of Microsoft and Amazon. A savvy real estate investor, the chief executive officer of Infosys owns over 700 apartments in the Seattle area.
Owned and managed by Shibulal's family office, Innovations Investment Management India, these apartments are spread across Seattle and Bellevue in the Northwest Pacific coast of the United States, home to some of the biggest companies in the world. Senior to mid-level employees of Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks and Boeing are among the tenants.
Real estate makes up over half the investments by the family office, including resorts and projects in India. We believe real estate as an asset class provides a high probability in protecting the wealth against inflationin the respective geographies in the long run," said Senthil Kumar N, who manages Shibulal's family office.
Kumar did not confirm or disclose the number of apartments owned by Shibulal's family in the Seattle area.
Also, many sub-segments of this asset class provide good current yields as well as potential for capital appreciation. They are, in some ways, similar to fixed income instruments in the near term with opportunities to improve the current yields by better asset/property management," Kumar added.
A person familiar with the investments and the ongoing real estate trends in the US said these apartments could be well be worth over $100 million (Rs 600 crore). The family is already testing the waters in Europe. Last year, the family office acquired a couple of residential apartment buildings in Germany — one each in Berlin and Frankfurt.
These investments are expected to give us geographical and as well currency diversification at an overall portfolio level," said Kumar, an IIM-Bangalore and BITS-Pilani graduate who joined the family office in 2005.
Family offices of wealthy Indians have started exploring ways to tap into the opportunities in overseasmarkets.
As ET reported earlier this month, Premji Invest, the eponymous family office of Wipro founder Azim Premji, is now looking to invest directly in technology companies in the US and China.
There are around 40-50 family offices in India with a corpus of $15-20 billion (about Rs 88,000 crore to Rs 1.2 lakh crore), according to industry estimates.
Shibulal, along with wife Kumari, daughter Shruti and son Shreyas, holds nearly 2.2% of Infosys, which has a market capitalisation of around $30 billion.
Shruti Shibulal has been actively building the family's real estate portfolio.
Shruti, an MBA from Columbia Business School who started her career with Merrill Lynch, runs several fine-dining restaurants, including Caperberry and Fava in the upmarket UB City in Bangalore.
Tamara Coorg, a luxury resort spread across 170 acres of coffee, cardamom and pepper plantations, is also one of her pet projects.
The Tamara will develop a 100 keys hotel project in Thiruvananthapuram, and will also take up the resort project in Kodaikanal as soon as the key approvals are in place," said Kumar.
Apart from ensuring healthy returns over a long period for the family office, both Kumari and Shibulal are actively pursuing several philanthropic initiatives.
The Sarojini Damodaran Foundation and The Advaith Foundation are two organisations set up by the family to focus on supporting primary education as well as funding higher education for bright students from poor families.
