2299 Market St. – aka the Icon SF – the first brand-new construction boutique building in the Castro neighborhood has been hotly anticipated. I have no doubt that the listing agents Suzanne Gregg and Jason Gorski of Paragon Real Estate have been fielding emails and phone calls at all hours of the night and day. Which is rather impressive considering that until today, the building was completely under wraps with scaffolding covered in a protective shroud.

As I drove by the construction site today, I noticed that the scaffolding was being removed and that the protective wrapping had been removed. 2299 Market St., it appears, is finally ready to make it’s public debut.

Without further comment, here are three pictures of The Icon. Click on any image for a larger version and slideshow:

I can’t think of a recent new construction building in San Francisco where the design hasn’t been controversial or offensive to some, while loved or admired by others.

I expect that the public reaction to 2299 Market St. will probably be just like every other new building in San Francisco – some will love it, some will hate it, and other will just shrug and roll their eyes when they see how expensive condominium homes in San Francisco are.

That said, I’m thrilled to see 2299 Market get closer to completion. Regardless of your thoughts about the building design, I hope we can all agree that it is far better than the hole in the ground that occupied the site since 1981.

As I mentioned at the beginning, we aren’t the listing agents for The Icon SF. We offer savvy buyers independent representation. The listings agents for the developer are Paragron Real Estate, Suzanne Gregg and Jason Gorski. If you would like to work directly with them on the purchase of a home in this building, please get in touch directly with them. If you’d like your own representation, though, don’t hesitate to give me a call or an email.

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Construction at NEMA (New Market, can’t say I love the acronym) is well underway. The building site is located at the corner of 10th St. and Market St., and is part of the mid-market area, although SFAR would put the building in the SOMA neighborhood. The site is a Crescent Heights development project, and it was originally approved years and years and years ago, and then sat empty during the downturn when no bank would lend. Below is a picture of the development site that was taken in January of 2012, shortly after construction began. The site currently has three street addresses: 1411 Market St., 18 10th St., and 8 10th St.

The developer for the project is Crescent Heights, and the architect for the buildings is Handel Architects, LLP. The three renderings below are all courtesy of the Handel Architects site.

The renderings don’t do a great job of showing it, so I’m going to have to go by and get some more pictures, but the building is really rather dark on the exterior. I don’t know if the glass being installed on the upper floors will soften the over-all effect, but right now all of the shiny black panels and matte black stone panels make the building feel incredibly dark.

It probably doesn’t help that it is surrounded by rather large buildings that often block the sun and create interesting shadows.

In the rendering above, the building appears gray with dark-blueish glass. In reality, the lower buildings feel very very black.

The project site was cleared for development in 2007, originally it was going to be 719 residential condominiums for sale. However, the 2008 financial crisis killed that dream, and in 2009 the site was redesigned by Handel Architects and the number of residences was increased to 754. It was also at this time that the developer decided to rent the homes instead of selling them.

The 754 homes are in four different towers, one of which is 9 stories, the others are 12, 22, and 35 stories each. The four towers are unified at the base in a building with two residential lobbies and ground-floor commercial space that fronts both 10th street and Market street. The building will offer extensive amenities, including:

• Fitness center
• Swimming pool
• Fire pit
• Billiards room
• Landscaped terraces on the 3rd, 11th, and 24th floors

The developer of NEMA is aiming for LEED certification by the U.S. Green Building Council.

What are your thoughts? Would you live here? Are you Darth Vader?

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Construction at 45 Lansing in South Beach is underway!

The off-again-on-again-off-again-on-again-will-someone-please-finance-this-building-before-the-developer-changes-their-mind-again project has gotten underway, as you can see from the picture down below.

What you can’t see from the picture is just how strange the floor plan for the lobby floor of 45 Lansing is. So, since I like to be helpful, I’ve gone ahead and scanned it and highlighted various areas to help show what an, um, interesting floor plan, 45 Lansing has.

Lansing Street is on the left side of the picture below, with the gas station on the top side of the below image, Harrison on the right side, and existing structures on Lansing along the bottom of the image below.

45 Lansing First Floor Plan

I’ve highlighted the shared lobby space above in a light purple color. As you can see, the main building entrance is on Lansing Street, with the garage access for cars being on Harrison St. and the elevator lobby being located roughly in the middle of the building along the west wall.

The light yellow spaces in the picture above belong to three studio homes that the developer has decide to put on the lobby level. They are all studio homes of several hundred square feet each, and it appears that they will all have direct street access from Lansing St., as well as direct lobby access (although it appears two of the homes will be accessed from one door).

I can’t think of any luxury building in San Francisco that has homes directly accessible off of the entrance level. Definitely not at Millennium Tower or The Infinity, and not even at any of the slightly older buildings that I can think of.

Do you know of a building in SF that has private entrances for residences directly off of the lobby area? If you can, please leave a comment below, I’d absolutely love to hear about them. And if you know of some buildings outside of SF that have a similar setup, I’d also love to hear about those.

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Yesterday Wooly Mammoths made the news – Russian scientists discovered an incredibly well-preserved specimen that had meaty red flesh and liquid blood.

What does this have to do with the Transbay Terminal, you ask?

The slideshow above shows some pics I took a while back of construction progress on the Transbay Terminal. For those of you who have been following the site closely, you may recall that last fall Wooly Mammoth bone fossils were found at the site. In particular, a Wooly Mammoth tooth was found about 110 feet below ground. To give you an idea of just how large Wooly Mammoths were, the tooth that was found was about 12″ long. All the better to eat you with, my dear?

Sadly, the Wooly Mammoth remains found in San Francisco are not nearly as well preserved as those recently found by the Russians. The Russian fossil is in such good shape that scientists are actually discussing whether or not it is feasible to clone a new Wooly Mammoth – about 10,000 years after they went extinct – from the genetic material that they have found. From an article describing the find:

The carcass was in such good shape because its lower part was stuck in pure ice, said Semyon Grigoryev, the head of the Mammoth Museum, who led the expedition into the Lyakhovsky Islands off the Siberian coast.

“The blood is very dark, it was found in ice cavities bellow the belly and when we broke these cavities with a poll pick, the blood came running out,” he said in a statement released by the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, which sent the team.

Talk about a brave new world?

As for our local fossil, the Transbay Authority is donating it to the California Academy of Sciences, and apparently talks are under way regarding the public display of this and any other fossils found at the site.

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Steve Jobs killed the Tower Records on Market Street a long, long time ago (2007 is when they closed their 2280 Market St. location). Since then, the site has been either vacant (as it currently is) or occupied by a variety of “temporary” businesses, including costume shops and Under One Roof for a period of time. Trader Joe’s has also been interested in the site, but after a fair amount of community opposition they shelved their dreams for a store at this site.

Enter, CVS. Amercia’s other pharmacy wants to open a location at 2280 Market, and received approval from SF Planning at their May 16 meeting to go ahead with remodeling the site and opening a store that will bring about 10,000 more square feet of pharmacy and drug-store shopping to the neighborhood. You can see the planning department document in all of it’s glory right here (PDF), if that’s your kind of thing.

Well rendered homosexual browses well rendered CVS store at 2280 Market St. Source: SF Planning.

The fine gentleman over at Castrobiscuit point out the rather schizophrenic decision making employed by the planning department to justify this land use, particularly given the fact that the planning department just shot down a new Starbucks location at 15th/Market/Sanchez because there were already too many coffee shops in the neighborhood.

But even though we have too many coffee shops in the Castro neighborhood to allow for any more coffee shops… the seven other drugstores in the neighborhood apparently weren’t enough to promote competition and low prices, at least according to SF planning logic.

In fact, if you look at the SF planning document closely, you’ll see they only identify the neighborhood as having two pharmacies – one at the Safeway (14th/Market/Church), and the Walgreens at 18th/Castro. What seems to have slipped right past them are the other Walgreens on 18th, the other other Walgreens in the 2100 block of Market Street, the AHF pharmacy on 18th street, the AHF pharmacy at 100 Church street, or the CPMC pharmacy at 14th/Castro.

But remember folks – too much coffee is dangerous. So bring on the formula retail and shrink-wrapped pharmacy fun!

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706 Mission St. is also known as the Mexican Museum, and it is the next San Francisco project from the folks at the Millennium Group – the developers that brought us the Four Seasons and Millennium Tower. The project is located on Mission between 4th and 3rd streets, closer to 3rd street on the north side of Mission Street.

Plaza where new tower is proposed adjacent to Aronson building

The proposed site would include the Aronson building on the corner of 3rd and Mission (which would be turned into luxury condos), and includes a new tower immediately to the west of the Aronson building.

The new tower at 706 Mission St, as originally proposed, would be 520 feet high, with about 47 stories of residences above a new Mexican Museum. However, any new development in San Francisco has to make it through a shadow study with the Planning and Recreation and Parks commission. If a new development casts new shadows in a city park, it has a problem on its hands. A big, shady problem.

Last Thursday, the Planning and Rec/Park Commissions exempted the 706 Mission St/Mexican Museum development from the shadow impact on parks law in SF. And they didn’t just do it to be nice, they did it in exchange for the developer dropping 40 feet (about 4 stories) from the high rise tower, making it about 480 feet high. By dropping the tower height, they manage to only cast a minimal shadow over Union Square that is gone before about 9:30am.

This will still make it the tallest building in the immediate area, with the Four Seasons coming in at about 400 feet (and with residents still not happy about the new development that would affect views for homeowners on the south side of the Four Seasons Residences), and also still significantly taller than the nearby W hotel, Westin, or Marriott.

The developer has currently agreed to endow the Mexican museum to the tune of about $5,000,000.

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We have to confess that the whole rollout of 300 Ivy has us a bit perplexed…

The Sales Office at 300 Ivy

The process goes roughly like this:

- The sales office has floor plan drawings and a small sample board. (see how tiny the sales office is in above picture)

- Get pre-approved with preferred lenders or be prepared to show proof of funds for an all-cash purchase.

- But… there are no set prices yet. Which means you’ll be making a reservation without knowing the actual price for the home you are interested in. One bedrooms are starting in the mid 600′s and two bedrooms in the mid 900′s, but no word on pricing for the studio or three-bedroom townhouse homes. 

- And if all that works for you, then starting this past Wednesday at 9am the sales office is accepting (via email) expressions of interest that include a pre-qualification letter, name, contact info, size of residence and broker info.

- The sales office will monitor which offers came in first and will rank them according by time received. They will only be accepting offers via email at their specified email address.

- The sales office will begin contacting interested parties on May 28th. They will be working on groups of 7-8 residences at a time and will call parties in order of how their reservations came in. At that time interested parties will be given specific pricing for a specific home and asked if they want to make a reservation.  There will be no bidding or counter offers – just a “Yes please or a”no thanks” and the sales office will move on to the next buyer.

- If you say “yes please” then a $5,000 deposit is required, followed by a 5% deposit at the time of writing the offer.

- Homes at 300 Ivy will be ready for hard hat tours sometime in June.

What are your thoughts about the rollout of homes at 300 Ivy?

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We took the video camera with us on Tuesday Tour this past week, and while we were out and about we happened upon the demolition of the warehouse buildings at 25 – 35 Dolores St. The site will eventually be home to 37 new residences and will most likely use the 35 Dolores St. address.  You can learn more about 35 Dolores St. if you like on our building information page.

As you can see from the above video, demolition has begun at the job site. While we don’t know the exact demolition schedule, it usually goes fairly quickly. I wasn’t at the site when they were knocking over any of the major structures, but you can see a tractor working hard inside one of the buildings to clear out all of the debris.

The warehouses were once used by S&C Ford, and were vacated when the S&C Ford closed. The main site of the dealership is across the street, and is currently being developed as 2001 Market St., which will  have condominium homes above a Whole Foods grocery store. The homes at 2001 Market St. were originally expected to be sold, but it appears the developer has decided to rent them instead.

As a completely random aside, there are now no more domestic new car dealerships within the city limits of San Francisco. Is it because of the city’s transit first policy, or just because everyone in the city seems to buy Japanese or German automobiles?

The project at 25 – 35 Dolores is not being developed by the same team as the 2001 Market St. project.

What are your thoughts on this new development in the Mission Dolores neighborhood? Are you excited to see something happening at the site or are you upset that the existing buildings are being razed for a new development? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

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The typical real estate cliche is, “location, location, location.” We here are dedicated to the highest standards in ethics, which is why our real walkthroughs happen thanks to connections, connections, connections. Unlike certain walkthroughs that look amazingly similar to the developer’s previously released update. Oh, and the fact that we’re pretty nice probably doesn’t hurt either.

Click Any Image Below to Begin Slideshow with Larger Images:

Anyway, as you can see from the slideshow above construction is progressing quite nicely on the Millwheel North development in the Dogpatch neighborhood.  The developer, Redmond Lyons, was kind enough to meet at at Millwheel North and walk us through the building and share some of his thoughts as a successful property developer in San Francisco. This is actually his third development on this block of Indiana/Minnesota, having recently completed Millwheel South and having built an earlier development down the street on Indiana in 2004. He was attracted – like many other San Franciscans – to the neighborhood because of its relatively inexpensive land prices. And given that this project has been in development for over 10 years, I can understand that concern.

Developer Redmond Lyons with Zephyr Founder Bill Drypolcher

The Millwheel North development will be very similar to Millwheel South, but the Millwheel North site is 12′ wider, which, along with slightly re-configured floor plans, allowed an increase from the 32 homes at Millwheel South to the 39 at Millwheel North. Because Millwheel North was entitled before the city’s transit first policy, every home will come with 1 car  parking, and there will be a few additional parking spots that the developer will most likely offer for sale to home buyers.

Construction is proceeding on schedule, with the Indiana building being further along than the Minnesota building, but construction progress for the overall site is on schedule for the Millwheel North sales center to open late this year, with occupancy taking place at about this time in 2014 if all continues on schedule.

What are your thoughts about Millhweel North and the Dogpatch neighborhood?

Important Disclaimer: We are not the listing agents for Millwheel North. The developer is exclusively represented by the fine folks at Polaris Pacific.

Stay Up to Date with Millwheel North News:

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The six new condo homes from the team of Agosta Builders and Kennerly Architecture at 300 Cornwall are getting ready for their debut on the San Francisco Real Estate Society stage. Located on the edge of the Inner Richmond and Lake districts, the new condo homes at 300 Cornwall are listed by the amazing team of Colleen Cotter and Frank Nolan of Vanguard Real Estate.  The very gracious Ms. Cotter was kind enough to give us a little sneak peak this past week.

The six homes are all beautifully done, with elegant high-end finishes and lots of interesting light and shadows thanks to the interesting use of angled walls and ceilings in various rooms.

Home sizes at 300 Cornwall vary, but all of the homes offer three bedrooms and range in size from 1300-to-1650 square feet of living area. Residences at 300 Cornwall feature open floor plans that feature:

• Direct access to private outdoor decks from main living areas
• Great natural light through floor-to-ceiling Bonelli windows
• Clean architectural lines and high-volume ceilings
• Wide-planked natural wood floors
• Textured Italian porcelain with touches of Venetian marble plaster
• Cove accent lighting
• Pre-wired for data, A/V, and security
• Radiant floor heat
• LED lighting (common areas and units)
• 3.5 kilowatt photovoltaic system (powers common-area lighting)
• Thermal-solar hot-water heating
• 97+% efficient gas boilers

Prices vary based on home layout and size, but you can expect homes to start at about $1,500,000 and go up from there.

The homes on the east side of the building are above the ground-floor commercial space. No word yet on any interested tenants, but if whoever ends up using the commercial space is also in the market for a new home, they might find 300 Cornwall to be an irresistible combination!

If you are interested in Independent Buyer Representation, then please sign up below for more information, or give me an email at matt@jacksonfuller.com or a call at (415) 203-1745. If you prefer to work directly with the listing agent, then please get in touch directly with either Colleen Cotter or Frank Nolan.

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