Signature Bank Seeks $2M in SF Office Lawsuit

UPDATED: JULY 7 at 4:30 p.m.:

A lawsuit that recently moved to the federal courts seeks tenant improvement reimbursement fees for a downtown San Francisco office building occupied by the shuttered Signature Bank.

In the complaint, the bank claims the property owner hasn’t reimbursed Signature as compensation for agreed-upon renovations.

The buildout of The Providian Financial Center on 201 Mission Street was completed in 2019. Signature leased office space on the 26th floor, which at the time was the bank’s first location on the West Coast. LaSalle Investment Management, an independent subsidiary of brokerage JLL, first entered a joint venture for the property in 2005 for roughly $220 million with Equity Office Properties. EOP had been the property owner since 2003, and are listed as such in property records; however, a representative from EOP confirmed to The Real Deal that the company sold its remaining stake to LaSalle more than 10 years ago.

The lawsuit alleges that all parties agreed that Signature could make tenant “improvements” to its space and the property owner would reimburse the costs up to $115 per rentable square foot, or just shy of $2 million.

LaSalle allegedly had to reimburse Signature within 30 days of submission of a request for reimbursement. However, Signature claims that the owner has “intentionally or baselessly refused to pay Signature Bank the money that is owed.”

Signature Bank was taken over by federal regulators on March 13 to prevent a widening crisis spurred by the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. A week after the announcement of the shutdown, a subsidiary of New York Community Bank, named Flagstar Bank, assumed all deposits of Signature Bank, as well as a portion of its loan portfolio and all 40 branches of the shuttered bank.

The lawsuit was transferred to the federal courts last month after it was filed with the state of California in November.

The Providian is a 30-story, Class A building. It was originally built in 1983 and totals nearly 600,000 square feet.

When Signature Bank was shut down it was FDIC-insured, with total assets of $110 billion and total deposits of $89 billion, as of Dec. 31. Signature had funded about $35.7 billion worth of real estate loans, about 48 percent of the bank’s total loan portfolio, according to its most recent regulatory filings.

Correction: A previous version of this story inaccurately identified the owners of the Providian Financial Center.