Eighty-Seven Dollars A Foot Against Eight Hundred

The number everyone will quote is $87 a foot against $800. The number that actually changes the asset is 2082.

865 Market Street — 1.5 million-plus square feet across nine levels — went back out for bids due September 9, with CBRE marketing. Brokers expect no more than $130 million, roughly $87 per square foot, against a $1.2 billion / $800 per foot valuation a decade ago. That is a -89.2% move and a 9.2x compression in price per foot. Lenders including Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase were owed $558 million when Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield stopped paying — implying a recovery near 23.3%.

A 1.5 million square foot vertical mall in a downtown that has not recovered its foot traffic is not a retail asset in any conventional sense. It is a large, well-located, structurally sound building with sixty-plus years of site control newly attached to it. The ground lease has been extended through options to 2082 — the single most consequential thing to happen to this property since Nordstrom left, and it has received almost no coverage. The mall is 93% vacant.

The March deal is the cautionary detail. Presidio Bay and Prado went to contract at $130 million and walked in July after months of diligence. Whatever they found is presumably still there, and the current guidance is the same $130 million.

Two things need saying clearly. This is a bid deadline and a re-listing, not a closed trade — nothing has sold. And $130 million is broker expectation, not a contract price. The originating report sits behind The Wall Street Journal's paywall and was read through secondary summaries.

One more caution, because it will trip up anyone searching this: headlines from March 2026 claiming the mall sold at auction for about $133 million describe the Presidio Bay deal that never closed. The mall has not previously traded.

Implications. At $87 a foot, the buyer is not underwriting retail. They are buying floor plates, structure, and site control at a basis low enough to support almost any future use — and the sixty-year lease term is what makes a total repositioning financeable at all.

The lender read is bleaker and more instructive. A roughly 23% recovery on $558 million against a trophy urban asset is the kind of mark that reprices an entire category. Green Street has mall prices up 13% over the past year; this trade, if it clears, will not look like that recovery. The averages are hiding enormous dispersion.