Downtown San Francisco Office Tower Likely to Sell at Discount: Sources | Hacker News Reader

Downtown San Francisco Office Tower Likely to Sell at Discount: Sources

sfstandard.com

29 pointsshaburn18 comments

I was hoping to get thirty thousand for my 1998 Honda Accord, but the best offer I got was four hundred bucks. Thanks for ruining the economy Work-From-Homers!

If this trend continues, with less office space used, while population numbers stay stable or increase, is there a possibility of commercial buildings like this being rezoned to residential?

There don’t seem to be any rules preventing residential construction in the existing C-3-O zone. In general SF permits residential construction anywhere, but the problems come from the fact that all development permits in that city are discretionary, so you never know what the real rules are until you get in front of a hearing.

If they can make that conversion this seems like it would be a steal. $225/sq ft versus over $1000/sq ft for residential in SF. SF doesn't seem like somewhere that would vote against more housing being available, so if it doesn't even involve rezoning, I'm curious if that's a viable path for this and other office buildings.

From my understanding the utility requirements for residential versus office means that it is often easier/cheaper to just demolish and rebuild.

However, the more skyscrapery the building gets, the less that may be the case.

I've seen a few stories about this, mostly in relation to banks' CRE portfolios showing weakness to varying degrees

https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/convert-emp...

Prop 13 needs to exclude commercial real estate and/or have a reasonably low cap. These companies are avoiding so many millions of dollars in property taxes. It's not fair and punishes the younger generations (and those yet to be born).

Yes, but California voters struck it down https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_15,_Tax_on_Co...

I will buy an SF Condo for under 300 a square foot and bring in battery lights and a portapotty. Please stop this BS that conversion is cost infeasible. Thank you.

Just suggesting that SF property tax revenues are doomed, without actually doing the math, is pretty lazy. This is all open data.

At $225/sq ft it would be bad news. I’m sure a lot of newer properties are assessed at triple that.

No reason to assert your surety or not, it's in the damn article:

> According to real estate firm JLL, approximately 48% of office space have been resold or refinanced since 2015 at an average price per square foot of around $700

Refinancing a property doesn't trigger reassessment for property taxes in California. It has to change hands. So this statement means nothing.

It would be free to do some token new construction or change of ownership though

You interpreted my remark backwards. What I meant to say was that refinancing in the past would not have triggered assessment, so the fraction of properties refinanced doesn’t imply properties that are assessed above market value. Owners can always ask for a downward assessment, without a change of control.

Ah yeah, I see. I was thinking more about the downward assessments on sold buildings. Below $400/sq ft is pre-2010 prices.

They are, lots of reasons, do you have data suggesting otherwise?

Now you know who’s behind all these gaslighting articles posted for a whole year now!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com