In the latest “owner-user” deal—a transaction involving a company that was previously a tenant purchasing offices they intend to occupy—LendingClub Corp., a San Francisco-based fintech firm, is paying $74.5M, or about $318 per square foot, to buy 88 Kearny Street, a 21-story office tower on the edge of the Financial District.
LendingClub is acquiring the 234,000-square-foot tower from Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The fintech firm plans to use the building as its headquarters.
As investment sales heat up, more high-profile distressed office properties are heading for the selling block in San Francisco.
In fact, San Francisco-based Shorenstein and partner Blackstone have tapped Eastdil Secured to list 45 Fremont Street for sale at the direction of lender Bank of America, which originated a $347M loan for the 620,000-square-foot office tower in 2019, according to the San Francisco Business Times.
Blackstone, which acquired a 49% ownership stake in 45 Fremont in 2017, wrote its investment in the building down to zero in 2023. The 34-story tower is the second office building in Shorenstein’s San Francisco portfolio to go on the selling block this year, alongside 208 Utah Street.
Eastdil Secured is marketing a $417M loan backed by Market Center, a two-building, 745,000-square-foot office complex at 555-557 Market Street that was the former downtown headquarters of energy giant Chevron.
Earlier this month, lenders tapped Newmark to list a $187.5M loan backed by the KPMG Building, a 380,000-square-foot office tower owned by Paramount and located at 55 Second Street. The asking price is expected to be in the mid-to-high $300-per-square-foot range, valuing the loan at about $140M. The debt for the 25-story tower at 55 Second matures in October 2026, a month after anchor tenant KPMG is due to relocate from its 140K-square-foot space in the building to a new office at 505 Howard Street.
Manhattan-based Paramount last year wrote down its investment in 55 Second down to zero. Paramount acquired a 44% stake in the KPMG Building for $402M, about $1,057 per square foot, in 2019.
Paramount has zeroed out two other big-ticket office acquisitions it made in San Francisco in 2019, including its $722M purchase of the Market Center and a 293,000-square-foot tower at 111 Sutter, which it bought for $227M.
Paramount Group defaulted on the Market Center loan last summer. Lenders led by Amsterdam ING began exploring a sale of the debt at the end of last year. San Francisco-based Flynn Properties is in talks to acquire the debt for about $230 per square foot, which would put the price tag at about $175M, according to a report in the Business Times.
Last week, Wells Fargo selected a buyer for its longtime headquarters in San Francisco, a 409,000-square-foot tower at 420 Montgomery Street. Forge Development Partners, a residential developer with a portfolio of group housing projects in San Francisco, is in talks to buy the building for $54M, about $135 per square foot.
Forge is planning an office-to-residential conversion of 420 Montgomery. Early last year, Forge announced that it would acquire the Humboldt Bank Building at 785 Market Street and convert the 94,000-square-foot property into 120 homes.
If the project moves forward, 420 Montgomery would become the largest office-to-resi conversion to date in San Francisco. A 120-unit housing project has been proposed for an office building at 785 Market Street and a partial conversion is in the works for the Warfield Building at 988 Market Street.
Wells Fargo disclosed in December that it would move its HQ from 420 Montgomery Street to an existing leased office at 333 Market Street, as the bank continues to downsize its office space in San Francisco. Wells Fargo has shed about half of its pre-pandemic office footprint in the city, including an office building at 550 California Street that it sold to Peninsula investor Roger Fields in 2023.
Led by a bevy of large tech deals, office leasing volume in San Francisco surged to a 10-year quarterly high of 3.4M square feet in the first quarter of 2025. Adding momentum to an emerging office recovery, the total availability rate in the San Francisco office market dropped to 35.6% in Q1, a 100-bps decline from the previous quarter, Savills reported.
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