San Francisco

1600 Market; envisioned mixed-use redux
The proposed 1 Franklin development for which a building permit has been filed would rise directly across the street from the Stanley Saitowitz envisioned nine story 1600 Market, the site for which remains on the market at $3,100,000 (down from $3,195,000 a year ago). The listing for 1600 Market now notes "approved" for "thirty-six residential units, street level commercial and eleven garage parking spaces" but with no permits filed (and not currently part of the Planning Department's Pipeline Report for San Francisco).
Socketsite.com - March 15, 2010

SFMOMA finds creative solutions for expansion
At least one San Francisco institution should be thankful for the dreadful real estate market: SFMOMA. The museum recently struck a deal to buy 935 Folsom St. and bankroll a new $10 million firehouse to serve the South of Market neighborhood. In exchange, the city will deed Fire Station No. 1 and part of Hunt Alley to SFMOMA, which will allow the museum to build a new wing... SFMOMA looked at no fewer than 67 different sites before settling on seven that fit the bill - most of which were properties that had been snapped up by residential developers during the housing boom.
San Francisco Business Times - March 15, 2010

Luries sell historic S.F. bank building
Los Angeles investor Downtown Property Holdings has bought the former Bank of Italy building at 550 Montgomery St. in San Francisco for $12.6 million. The 94,000-square-foot building was one of the last real estate holdings of the Lurie family, for a half century one of San Francisco's most prominent real estate owners. The sale, at $134 a square foot, comes more than three years after the Lurie Co., which owned the San Francisco Giants from 1978 to 1993, unloaded a portfolio of San Francisco properties, including 400 Montgomery St., which the Hearst Corp. bought for $27 million; 901 Market St., bought by Urban Realty for $65 million; and 417-451 Montgomery St., which MK Equities bought for an undisclosed price but the city recently assessed at $24 million.
San Francisco Business Times - March 15, 2010

Mission Bay incubators' flock is ready to hatch
Mission Bay's incubator network is hatching life science successes. The network's 25th early-stage company -Pharmajet, a needle-free vaccine delivery company founded in Denver - opened March 8 in a mere 600 square feet in the Fibrogen Inc. building. But what Pharmajet and its startup Brethren lack in individual size, they make up for in collective oomph, said Douglas Crawford, associate director of QB3. The network's 19 current companies fill about 10,000 square feet at Fibrogen and 2,500 square feet at the 4-year-old QB3 Garage on the Mission Bay campus of the University of California, San Francisco.
San Francisco Business Times - March 15, 2010

$35M in New Capital averts hotel foreclosure
Millennium Partners has avoided foreclosure on its Four Seasons Hotel here with the help of a capital infusion from Westbrook Partners and a restructuring of the hotel's debt by the special servicer for the mortgage. The two companies, both based in New York City, are now joint venture partners in the hotel, with Westbrook taking a two-thirds ownership and Millennium Partners remaining as a one-third owner as well as asset manager for the property. Industry sources say that the JV has paid down $35 million of the $90 million that Millennium owed on the hotel, reducing the balance to $55 million.
GlobeSt.com - March 14, 2010

Two Vornado Realty properties go into special servicing
A subsidiary of Vornado Realty Trust notified the master servicer of the debt secured by its 2 million-square-foot High Point Furniture Mart in High Point, NC, that neither the subsidiary nor Vornado is prepared at this time to fund any shortfalls in debt service. As a result, Vornado has requested that the loan be transferred to special servicing. As of year-end 2009, the net book value of the properties was $148 million and the non-recourse debt secured by the properties was $217.8 million. Separate from that property, another subsidiary of Vornado did not make the debt service payment due March 1, on the Cannery, a 104,000-square-foot retail property in San Francisco. It is expected that the loan will be transferred to special servicing. As of year-end 2009, the net book value of the property was $22.3 million and the non-recourse debt secured by the property was $17.6 million.
CoStar.com - March 10, 2010

1717 17TH Street; Eastern Neighborhood plan in action as proposed
Recently rezone from Light Industrial to Urban Mixed-Use as part of the Eastern Neighborhoods Area Plan, the proposed 1717 17th Street project would demolish three existing buildings between De Haro and Carolina representing 12,000 square feet of Production, Distribution and Repair (PDR) and a surface area parking lot. In their place would rise two mirror image mixed-use buildings yielding 7,000 square feet of ground floor PDR, 8,000 square feet of commercial/retail, 41 residential units and 58 below-grade parking spaces.
Socketsite.com - March 12, 2010