2601 24th Street

The operators of the 16-room “Utah Hotel,” which is not to be confused with the Hotel Utah, are currently paying $6,000 a month in rent for the entire top floor of the 10,000-square-foot building on the southwest corner of 24th and Utah in the Mission.

A true single-room occupancy (SRO) operation with three shared restrooms and two baths for the sixteen bedrooms on the second floor, the hotel and its residents would be a challenge to displace.

But with the property having just hit the market listed for $8.8 million and touting an “excellent opportunity with tremendous potential,” it doesn’t mean the sellers aren’t hoping to to snag a buyer who’s willing to attempt a conversion of the top floor into something more akin to a tech commune, or at least a development that’s priced that way.

14 thoughts on “Mission Hotel For Commoners Hits The Market, Priced For “Potential””
  1. as a commercial broker selling multi-unit buildings…believe me, they’re not going to try. this is a grossly overpriced deal at $880/sq.ft. if the rooms all had private baths someone might try, but with only three shared baths and the city breathing down your neck for trying to change the use and diminish the sro stock, you can file this under the ‘life is too short’ category…this thing is worth $3.5M on its best day.

    1. perhaps a bit more than $3.5m, depending on when the master lease expires on the upper units. master lessee’s on sro bldgs are rarely the most scrupulous folk

    2. So right, anon. I don’t know what kind of fishing expedition the seller and his/her broker are on. It just makes your profession look idiotic. I’m a residential income property owner (Sacto and San Diego…NEVER SF). Most SF agents seem to not even know what a CAP rate is? Hope you do.

  2. I wish SROs could be used for their historical purposes- young working people moving to the city who don’t have anywhere to live yet. It’d be great for students and people moving to the city. Most seem to have bad reputations, it’d be nice if that changed.

    1. you mean like tech workers? that is the tack some sro operators are taking when upgrading their buildings. which had me thinking that is what happened years ago when these were built (but not for tech workers, of course). but today’s high paying glamorous tech jobs are tomorrow’s equivalent of the blue collar working class idling their time in a cube pecking at a keyboard and eventually living in their starter sro unit for 20 some years…history repeats itself.

    2. I though that historically, San Francisco’s SRO’s often were for merchant marine sailors in between assignments.

      1. Historically SF’s SROs have been for whatever mix of single laborers were around, often a good share were transient or seasonal. All the text below is from an excellent book with primary focus on SF, has plenty of photos, stats, floor plans.
        Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States, Paul Groth (complete book online for free at namelink)

        In 1880, a fourth of San Francisco’s hired laborers were single Chinese men no longer sent out to do far-flung railroad and field work. They comprised almost 90 percent of the 3,000 employees in the cigar and tobacco industry and over half the labor force in the boot and shoe manufactories.

        In the 1920 census, San Francisco registered over 17,000 general laborers and another 7,000 people working as longshoremen and sailors.
        In the economy of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, demand for hobo labor fluctuated wildly, even in comparison with the unstable work conditions for skilled workers. A bumper crop, a new railroad company, sudden demands for lumber, or an oil boom instantly employed thousands of new people and created the need to house them. Just as instantly, business downturns wiped out those positions. A slowdown in 1908 meant that American railroads employed 236,000 fewer men than they had employed the year before. When work was plentiful, hoboes came to the city to sign up at employment agencies catering to casual laborers; the agencies then sent them back out to distant labor sites. Some California farm workers migrated to and from the same San Francisco hotel for over fifty years.

        Outsiders knew Third Street and Howard Street as the South of Market; these streets were the core of the casual workers’ South of Market. Migrants often arrived in the railroad freight yards and walked north along Third Street. By the time they reached the corner of Third and Howard they would have found all that they needed to be at home for the day, week, or month. A 1914 survey estimated that 40,000 single men lived in the South of Market at the peak of the winter, and half of the city’s cheap lodging house rooms were in the district. About a third of these men were permanent city residents.

        In 1980, San Francisco’s permanent hotel residents numbered three times the population in the city’s public housing projects. Permanent residents occupied over half of the city’s 51,000 hotel rooms, and those 27,000 hotel homes comprised 10 percent of the city’s total housing units.

        Between 1975 and 1980, San Francisco landowners eliminated 6,085 units, almost a fifth of the city’s entire stock of residential hotel units.

  3. How is the asking price even justified? Based on perceived notion of being in the Mission District? The hotness of the Mission is also the hotbed of all progressive protests, marches, and ground zero for Campos. Hot one day could become cold the next. Ask the Marina neighborhood residents.

    The only upside to this place is the ability to build multiple stories on the large existing footprint. Assuming the City (and neighbors) fast-track the built-up.

  4. holy toledo! that’s less than 13 bucks a night per room cost basis. I’ll bet that the landlord would hate to see the building sold and open up the possibility of losing his little goldmine.

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