Private School Buys San Francisco Office Building for $24M

Students looking for a Chinese-American prep school may soon have a new campus at a former Airbnb headquarters in San Francisco’s Showplace Square.

Westwood US, an affiliate of English private school Wellington College, has paid $23.5 million for the former home-sharing business hub at 99 Rhode Island Street, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

The seller was an affiliate of A10 Capital, based in Idaho, which foreclosed on the building in May after Pennsylvania-based EQT Exeter defaulted on a $33 million mortgage loan.

The deal for the three-story, 63,800-square-foot office building works out to $368 per square foot.

The purchase comes after the Wellington College Education group announced in March it would launch its first U.S. school, Hiba Academy, in San Francisco.

The private school, to be affiliated with Wellington College China, will teach students in kindergarten through 8th grade in both English and Chinese, SFGate reported. Wellington had said this spring a location for the school hadn’t been determined. The school didn’t disclose when it planned to open Hiba’s doors.

Neither Westwood nor Wellington could be reached for comment by the Business Times.

Hiba would join private schools run by Wellington College Education in the United Kingdom, China, Thailand and India, according to Wellington’s website. Wellington’s flagship campus in Berkshire, England serves 1,100 students between 13 and 18 years old.

Westwood, Wellington’s U.S. affiliate, is among the first nontraditional buyers to close on an office building in post-pandemic San Francisco, according to the Business Times.

Office prices and rents have plunged after a shift to remote work, with office vacancy in June at a record 37 percent, according to CBRE.

San Francisco-based Westwood US, led by Joy Ying Qiao, paid a premium price for its school, with offices in the Financial District now trading for between $200 and $300 per square foot, and others as low as $120.

EQT Exeter bought the vacant office building — a popular workplace for tech firms Macromedia, Jawbone and Airbnb, which moved out in 2011 — in early 2021 for $37 million, or $580 per square foot.

The firm planned to fix up and rebrand the property to draw new tenants, but its plans fizzled. It never landed a single tenant.

EQT Exeter stopped making interest payments on the $33 million loan from A10 last July, and in December the lender served Exeter with a notice of default.

— Dana Bartholomew