Millennium Tower Apartment Values Sink After Building Fixes

San Francisco’s Millennium Tower might not be sinking anymore, but its apartment values still are.

The 58-story skyscraper, located at 301 Mission Street in South of Market, has continued to see falling apartment values in recent years despite structural improvements to fix its compromised foundation, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Meanwhile, values across nearby high-rise residential buildings downtown have also seen price declines since the pandemic, and this spring has also been particularly challenging due to uncertainty over tariffs, so the trend is not simply related to issues specific to the building.

Reports of Millennium Tower’s settling and tilting first surfaced in 2016. Two years later, the building’s homeowners association, developer Millennium Partners, and the local government agency Transbay Joint Powers Authority reached a $100 million settlement to reinforce the building’s foundation, according to Dezeen. The Journal reported that Millennium Partners agreed to compensate all condo owners for their loss in property values on a per-square-foot basis.

By 2023, engineers at Simpson Gumpertz & Heger stabilized the building’s foundation. Still, the building’s former structural integrity has seemingly marred its reputation, according to longtime resident and president of the board of the homeowners association Dr. Joel Piser.

“We’ve gotten so much negative press. We were easy targets — a bunch of people who have been successful in life and then are faced with this challenge,” Piser told the Journal. “Now, we have something to counter it with. We have met the project’s objective to stop the building from settling, and we’re recovering.”

Of the nine sales at Millennium Tower that have closed so far this year, sellers suffered an average 20.2 percent loss compared to what they originally paid for their units, according to the Journal. It was even worse last year with the 16 recorded sales marking an average 20.5 percent loss.

Some owners have been especially unlucky. One unit on the fifth floor sold last year for $720,000, down 52 percent from what the seller paid for it in 2015. In 2022, another resident sold a unit on the 54th floor for over $2.7 million — a loss of nearly 37 percent from the $4.3 million purchase price in 2012.

As of early June, 11 units at Millennium Tower were available for purchase. Nine of the 11 listings are for less than what the sellers originally paid for them.

A representative for Millennium Tower disputed the characterization of the building, emailing The Real Deal, “The diminution in MT unit values is on par with the neighborhood/area. Condo values in general were falling before the pandemic and have remained lower since, i.e., the building is performing like all condo buildings in the area. The previous structural conditions are not an issue.”

— Chris Malone Méndez

Clarification: This story was amended to provide context about the state of the market and a comment from a spokesperson for Millennium Tower.