About John

John McNellis is a principal with McNellis Partners, a commercial development firm he cofounded in the mid-1980s in Northern California.

After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California Hastings College of the Law, McNellis began his career as a lawyer in 1976 in San Francisco. More interested in business than in law, he started fixing up houses in his spare time and gradually worked his way to more complicated projects. At 28, he began his career as a retail developer.

Cobbling together the equity from friends and family, he built and opened his first shopping center in 1983, by which time McNellis was no longer practicing law—except on behalf of his own projects. Within a few years, he formed McNellis Partners with Beth Walter and Mike Powers. They continue to be partners more than 35 years later. Specializing in developing supermarket-anchored shopping centers in Northern California, the partnership has followed a strategy of developing about two projects a year and doing so with internal capital only, thus retaining 100 percent ownership of its developments. In recent years, the company has begun developing mixed-use projects and, in an effort to diversify, investing in small Silicon Valley office buildings and residential projects.

For more on John and his real estate projects please visit mcnellis.com.