San Francisco, CA
Calif. state bar sells its San Francisco building for $54 mln amid budget shortfall
The skyline of San Francisco, California showing the Transamerica Building framed by the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge is pictured at sunset February 27, 2008. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith Acquire Licensing Rights
Nov 14 (Reuters) – The State Bar of California has sold its 13-story San Francisco headquarters to a local real estate investment firm for $54 million, it said on Tuesday.
That sales figure is significantly less than the $85 million the state bar sought for the 211,000-square-foot building in San Francisco’s financial district earlier this year. The buyer is Ridge Capital Investors, which is based in San Francisco, the state bar said.
The State Bar was nearing a sale to a different buyer in June for $62 million, according to local media reports, but the deal fell through. San Francisco’s commercial real estate prices have been declining since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The State Bar purchased the building in 1998 for $22.5 million and began pursuing its sale in 2021. About 275 bar employees work at the location, according to the bar.
State Bar officials said they would use proceeds from the building’s sale to cover budget shortfalls, after state lawmakers declined to approve attorney licensing fee increases in 2024. The legislature approved the State Bar’s use of those building sale proceeds toward operations as it considers a fee increase in 2025, bar officials said.
An April report from the Auditor of the State of California found that rising personnel costs have fueled the bar’s deficit spending and that its general fund reserve had fallen from $19 million in 2020 to $12.4 million in 2022. The state bar’s own budget projected a deficit of $4.3 million in 2023, it said.
“The sale of 180 Howard was a prudent and necessary action on our part in these post-pandemic and precarious financial times,” said State Bar executive director Leah Wilson in a statement on Tuesday.
The State Bar will remain in it current offices at 180 Howard Street for about a year, then will rent about half of its current footprint in the same building after that.
Read more:
California state bar in ‘difficult financial position,’ audit finds
Facing budget shortfall, CA Bar says it’s ‘stretched impossibly thin’
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