Peter Acworth Buys Embattled San Francisco Building

A Mission District office building once caught up in a San Francisco government corruption scandal has a new owner who’s no stranger to the city’s commercial market.

An entity tied to Peter Acworth, founder of adult entertainment website Kink.com, bought the 95,000-square-foot office and industrial property at 1717 Mission Street for $14.9 million, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The purchase returns Acworth to a stretch of Mission Street long associated with his adult entertainment empire and closes the chapter on a property once owned by disgraced permit expediter Walter Wong.

The building served as headquarters for Wong’s Jaidin Consulting Group before FBI agents raided it in 2020 as part of the federal corruption investigation centered on officials including former Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru. Wong became a central figure in the probe into alleged pay-to-play relationships between developers, contractors and city officials in a scandal that reshaped San Francisco’s public contracting landscape.

In 2022, Align Real Estate floated replacing the aging building with a roughly 265,000-square-foot life sciences campus as the pandemic-era lab boom engulfed the Bay Area. But as venture capital funding slowed and demand for life sciences space cooled, the proposal never moved beyond the planning stage and the property returned to the market.

Like many commercial properties in San Francisco’s post-pandemic comeback, the building traded at a big markdown, fetching roughly $157 per square foot after hitting the market in 2020 with a $45 million, or nearly $474 per square foot, asking price. Acworth’s plans for the site remain unknown.

Acworth bought the nearby San Francisco Armory at 1800 Mission Street in 2006 for $14.5 million, going on to convert the historic military building into Kink.com’s headquarters and production studios before selling it for $65 million in 2018. Public records show entities tied to Acworth still own multiple properties in the neighborhood, though last month he sold three other buildings at 201 Ninth Street in South of Market and 220 Sixth Street and 2950-2952 21st Street in the Mission District for a combined $6.7 million.

— Chris Malone Méndez