Two-bedroom penthouse atop SF’s Millennial Tower seeks $14M

San Francisco’s infamous leaning tower is now topped by a 5,000-square-foot penthouse listing for $14 million in cash.

The penthouse crowning the 58-story Millennium Tower at the end of a $100 million effort to arrest its tilt has hit the market at 301 Mission Street in South of Market, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Its views span the Golden Gate and Bay bridges.

The seller is tech mogul Craig Ramsey, co-founder of the cloud-computing company Veeva Systems and of the software firm Vlocity, according to the Wall Street Journal. In 2016, Ramsey bought the furnished condo from the estate of the late venture capitalist Tom Perkins for $13 million.

The two-bedroom, three-bathroom penthouse has a 3,500-square-foot “great room” with an “orchestra ceiling” engineered to evenly spread music sound throughout, according to the listing. It also has a large terrace and a 6,000-pound sculpture made out of thin shards of glass. 

Broker Gregg Lynn of Sotheby’s International Realty holds the listing.

The owners in the building will be paying close attention to what happens with the sale, Doug Elmets, spokesman for the Millennium Tower Homeowners Association, told the Chronicle.

“The penthouse speaks to the quality of the building and represents a significant price for a beautiful condominium,” Elmets said. “The HOA is very focused on units that have a possibility of selling.”

Millennium Tower, a residential highrise built in 2009, began to sink and tilt two feet to the west under its own weight. To date, engineers have installed 18 piles to gird the building foundation. The sinking has stopped, and the building has begun to be righted, according to project engineer Ronald Hamburger of Simpson Gumpertz & Heger.

“The substantive work to ensure the building remains stable without movement or tilting should be complete by the end of June,” Hamburger told the Chronicle.

Banks are still not lending on the building’s 419 condos, meaning buyers either need to pay cash or get a private, high-interest loan. Then there’s the city’s Downtown — where a third of office buildings stand vacant, and boarded up shops and restaurants and homeless camps are below. 

It was an area that thrived when Millennium Tower’s tilt emerged in 2016. The once-soaring Downtown condo market has since crashed. 

Since January, sales of condos of more than $2 million in San Francisco were down 64 percent from the same period last year, according to Patrick Carlisle, who heads up research in Northern California for Compass. 

Howard Dickstein, president of Millennium Tower’s HOA, said the penthouse is an outlier because it’s so expensive and has only two bedrooms.

He said other units on the market will likely sell once word gets out that the building’s structural issues have been resolved. In addition to the penthouse, there are two other units now listed in the Millennium, one for $7.25 million and one for just under $6 million.

“I think the building’s reputation will quickly come back to where it deserves to be once this is behind us,” said Dickstein.  “It’s the pinnacle of luxury. It has beautiful views. The service is outstanding.”

— Dana Bartholomew

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