San Francisco’s beleaguered Oceanwide Center site is closer to coming under new ownership, five years after development stopped and left a gaping hole in the ground in South of Market.
The San Francisco Recovery Fund put down a nonrefundable deposit on the Oceanwide site at 50 First Street in a deal expected to value the parcel at about $100 million, the San Francisco Business Times reported, citing sources close to the deal. The deal is expected to close within the next two months. The exact deposit amount has not been disclosed.
The Recovery Fund, led by SKS Partners veteran Dan Kingsley and private equity alum Jay Yang, first entered a contract to buy the development site in September. With the deposit handed down, the Fund is nearing official ownership of the site.
Oceanwide Center’s history dates back a decade when Chinese developer Oceanwide Holdings acquired the site in 2015 for nearly $300 million. At the time, the developer plotted to build a 2-million-square-foot mixed-use project with one 605-foot tower with hotel and residences and another 910-foot tower with offices and residential units. Groundbreaking was held the following year.
In 2019, Oceanwide Holdings started looking for new capital funding for the project. The firm sought development partners or buyers who would completely take over the project. Meanwhile, the Beijing-based company paused work on its mixed-use Oceanwide Plaza project in Los Angeles, which sits abandoned and covered in graffiti today.
Oceanwide Holdings stopped construction on Oceanwide Center’s shorter building in 2019 and similarly paused work on the taller tower in the fall of 2020. The project came to a halt as the complex’s ground-floor concrete structure was completed.
Oceanwide subsequently entered various possible deals with development and capital partners, but none of them ever came to fruition. Creditors seized the project site in 2021 after missed payments on $321.5 million of debt, and stakeholders are still involved in litigation over unpaid bills. Those companies still have about $21 million in liens on the Oceanwide site, the Business Times reported.— Chris Malone Méndez
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