300 Grant Avenue sells for $155M to South Korea’s Hanwha

Union Square’s first new ground-up office-retail building in two decades has sold for $155 million, according to public records.

The buyer of 300 Grant Avenue is a subsidiary of South Korean conglomerate Hanwha, according to deed and title documents. The deal closed Aug. 9 but has not been reported until now.

Hanwha is the seventh-biggest conglomerate in South Korea, with interests ranging from hospitality to aerospace. Its biggest subsidiary is Hanwha Life, the entity that bought 300 Grant. As of 2018, Hanwha Life had assets worth more than $100 billion, according to the company’s website. Established in 1946, it’s South Korea’s oldest life insurance company, according to the site.

The 300 Grant deal almost ties the $156 million paid by Lincoln Property Company and Cara Investment for the Saks Fifth Avenue building at 384 Post, also in Union Square, last October. But the price per square foot that Hanwha paid — $2,200 — is nearly double the $1,150 Lincoln paid for the 1980s-era Post Street building with more than 130,000 square feet. The Grant Avenue property has 70,000 square feet of new office and retail space.

Dallas-based Lincoln acted as the fee developer for 300 Grant and has been part of its redevelopment since St. Bride’s Managers, a global real estate investment manager, purchased the property in 2014 for $49.2 million. London-based St. Bride’s appears to have brought in Artha Capital and Zeno Capital as partners in 2017 and transferred the deed to their aptly named A-Z300 Grant LLC at that time, according to public records. A year later, Lincoln demolished the existing three-story, 40,000-square-foot building and began constructing a new six-story structure, the first ground-up retail in Union Square in two decades. Construction wrapped up in September 2020.

Even in the early pandemic days, the lack of comparable new product in Union Square brought the building its first retail tenant — high-end outdoor apparel and gear company Arc’teyx — within months. In the summer of 2021, diamond retailer Brilliant Earth opened a showroom.

Cushman and Wakefield represents the property, whose 30,000-square-foot retail component is nearly 50 percent occupied, according to its website. The brokerage didn’t publicly list the building for sale. Hanwha Life requested that tax statements from its acquisition be mailed to the property’s fourth floor, indicating that the company may have plans to be an owner-occupier of its offices.

Hanwha currently rents space for its DreamPlus Digital Lab in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. Its website indicates that DreamPlus is an accelerator that connects Asian backers to information and communication tech startups. The limited liability company that bought the Union Square building on Hanwha’s behalf gave the South Park address as its primary location.

The sale is one of only a handful of $100 million-plus downtown retail deals in recent years, and is one of the biggest since Ikea’s shopping center arm, Ingka Centres, bought the empty 6×6 shopping center on Market Street for $200 million in 2020.

In Union Square proper, the Tiffany’s building at 360 Post Street sold to a European buyer for $135 million in 2016, but other than that and the Saks deal, there have been few of this magnitude. The shopping mecca was hit hard by the lack of tourism and widely publicized safety issues during the pandemic. Chanel’s purchase of 340 Post Street for $63 million had been the biggest retail deal of 2022. At $3,500 per square foot, it was more than $1,000 a foot higher than the 300 Grant deal.

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