Gary Jabara has overseen two successful business startups, one major business reinvention, and a big commercial real estate buying spree—all in a little over 10 years.
Any one of those accomplishments could have earned him accolades as a prosperous entrepreneur.
Taken together, they put the Newport Beach resident among the ranks of Orange County’s most prominent executives, with a leading role in the region’s technology and real estate industries.
Jabara’s list of achievements also landed him among the seven winners at the Business Journal’s annual Excellence in Entrepreneurship Awards on March 18 at the Hotel Irvine (see related coverage, pages 1, 8, 10, 12 and 14).
Mobilitie LLC, a Newport Beach-based telecommunications infrastructure company, was Jabara’s first big hit.
It was founded in 2005, after Jabara—a longtime partner at Deloitte’s telecommunications infrastructure practice in Los Angeles—left the accounting and consulting firm.
“I was dumb enough to leave Deloitte—my parents weren’t sure what I was doing,” Jabara previously told the Business Journal. “We happened to stumble on a great business.”
Mobilitie (pronounced “mobility”) initially focused on cellphone towers and grew into one of the largest owners of cellphone towers in the U.S. within a few years. Multiple cellphone companies typically lease space on individual towers for several thousand dollars per month to improve their wireless service.
Technology features of the towers were important, as was the real estate component of the business. Jabara said he realized early on that cell towers were actually “vertical real estate”—like commercial office buildings, whose operations lend themselves to a real estate investment trust model.
Mobilitie was able to grow throughout the recession, becoming the fourth-largest owner of cell towers nationwide by 2012.
Big Deal
That’s when Jabara made his first fortune, selling 2,300 cellphone towers for $1.1 billion.
The sale—which earned him an EY National Entrepreneur of the Year award for the real estate sector—represented only “a portion” of Mobilitie’s holdings, he said at the time of the sale.
Jabara funneled a good amount of the windfall into the area’s commercial real estate scene, snapping up more than $200 million worth of properties in Orange County.
Larger properties he owns include a Newport Beach shopping center anchored by a Pavilions grocery store, as well as the University Drive office that holds Mobilitie’s headquarters.
Residential real estate also became a focus for Jabara, who in 2013 helped fund the launch of Newport Beach-based Villa Real Estate LLC, which is now one of the area’s largest brokerages for high-end homes.
Villa now has more than 100 brokers and has office locations in Newport Beach, Corona del Mar, Laguna Beach and the Balboa Peninsula.
Sports Focus
Not everything has gone Jabara’s way.
In 2012, he led an ownership group that tried, unsuccessfully, to buy the San Diego Padres baseball team.
His interest in sports has found another outlet through the next big technology push coming from Mobilitie.
The company has become a leader in the installation of distributed antenna systems, or DAS, permanent antenna systems that can be placed in a variety of indoor and outdoor venues to provide better cellphone and wireless connections for patrons.
Mobilitie was estimated to have an enterprise value—essentially its market cap plus debt and minus cash—of between $400 million and $500 million as of 2013. It is now believed to be the country’s largest supplier of DAS for stadiums and other sporting venues where tens of thousands of smartphone-wielding customers can be in close proximity—checking online highlights, posting videos or pictures to Facebook or other sites, or just making calls.
Venues using the company’s DAS technology include Churchill Downs in Kentucky, the casinos of Las Vegas-based MGM Resorts International, and the Honda Center in Anaheim, among other notable locations.
Mobilitie helped AT&T set a record at Churchill Downs in 2014 for the most data to cross its mobile network at a single event up until that point.
