Sansome Street Advisors Acquires Flagship Ross Dress for Less Building

San Francisco-based investors Sansome Street Advisors is adding another building to its portfolio.

ASB Real Estate Investments just offloaded 799 Market Street, an office and retail building home to a Ross Dress For Less, to the tune of $44 million, as reported by the San Francisco Business Times. That’s $300 per square foot for the 145,500-square-foot property.

That’s a fraction of the $141.3 million that ASB paid for the eight-story building in 2016. The sale marks the fourth San Francisco asset that ASB has sold at a loss in the past nine months. The others were two SoMa office buildings at 795 Folsom Street and 989 Market Street and an 88-unit apartment complex in Rincon Hill.

799 Market went up for sale late last year with an asking price of roughly $50 million, per the Business Times. The mixed-use property boasts 90,500 square feet of office space and a nearly 55,000-square-foot, four-story retail space occupied by Ross.

More than half of the building’s office space appears to be available for lease. In total, the building has approximately 52,000 square feet of open space for office tenants.

It’s quite the tumble from reaching 100 percent lease capacity less than a decade ago. At the time, ASB announced a full-floor lease with online publisher Medium, though Google now lists the fifth-floor office as permanently closed.

Sansome Street’s specialty lies in snapping up office properties “for equity investors,” per the firm’s LinkedIn. Once a property is under their control, the company “repositions the asset to achieve maximum value either as a stabilized cash flow hold or as an institutional resale.”

In addition to 799 Market, Sansome Street also owns Latham Square, a 121-700-square-foot office building in downtown Oakland acquired in 2018 for $61.5 million. It attempted to reverse course and sell it less than a year later, but they remain the owners per Alameda County property records.

— Chris Malone Méndez