Wait so I can get a huge office building for the cost of three mediocre single family homes?
At California foreclosure auctions, my understanding is the lender will usually bid up to the loan balance or their estimate of what they can sell it for with some marketting and time. That it sold for $6M to the lender tells you that nobody was prepared to make an offer on it given the time constraints, not that the fair market value is $6M. The lender will operate it and prepare it for sale and buyers will be able to take their time to do due dilligence etc, and most likely it will sell for somewhat more than $6M.
The purpose of a foreclosure auction include clearly establishing a change of ownership. If the lender pursued judicial foreclosure and a deficiency judgement, the fair market value will be litigated some time after the sale, and the borrower may need to make up the difference between the loan balance and fair market value.
It's zoned for mixed use (although the donut shop on the ground floor left years ago and I'm pretty sure that space has been vacant for a few years). It's in between Powell and Civic Center stations. It's a pretty decent location, with some great food and entertainment near by although the fancier restaurants closed ages ago. It's basically across the street from the Golden Gate Theater and the Warfield.
The neighborhood is what it is. IKEA and their new, popular, food hall is less than a block away. Looks like there's some hipster dofus AI incubator right there too.
The building itself just wasn't well maintained. Last I saw you were far more likely to get trapped in the elevator than mugged.
I did go out of my way to describe it as “roughest” and not “worst”. Least compatible with the image of perfection projected by the typical tower-dwelling corpo? :)
In fact I have a lot of fond memories from the mid-2010s of stopping by the weed lounge on Jessie for a Volcano bag and a few floors of Isaac Rebirth on my PSVita any time my afternoon train was significantly delayed. Alas that just closed too for the same reason: https://sfstandard.com/2024/02/02/san-francisco-cannabis-dis...