BH Properties to Open Acquisitions Office in San Francisco

BH Properties is planting a flag in San Francisco by opening a new regional office after buying Anchorage Square on Fisherman’s Wharf and a 59-acre former college campus in Oakland.

The Los Angeles investor has hired real estate investment veteran Peter Horn to run the new office in Anchorage Square at 500 Beach Street, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

Horn was plucked from San Francisco-based Soma Capital Partners, where he was a partner and head of acquisitions. In his career, he has handled more than $1 billion in real estate deals.

“We have been looking for opportunities to expand our operational presence in the Bay Area for quite some time,” Jim Brooks, president of Los Angeles-based BH Properties, said in a statement. “Peter is an opportunistic investor who has the expertise and relationships to uncover new opportunities throughout Northern California.”

Horn served Soma Capital for 11 years, where he sourced, structured and closed value-add investments, while handling financing, asset management and dispositions.

At BH Properties, he’ll serve as managing director of acquisitions and lead the firm’s growth across the Bay Area.

In June, BH bought the 66-year-old former campus of Holy Names University at 3500 Mountain Boulevard, in the Oakland hills, for $65 million. It then hung a “for lease” sign on the property, with candidates including a range of schools.

The campus contains 19 buildings, including a gymnasium, performing arts center, chapel, library, 30 classrooms and housing for 450 students.

In August, BH closed on its $65 million purchase of the mostly empty 200,000-square-foot Anchorage Square, among the largest private properties along Fisherman’s Wharf. The deal for the shopping center worked out to $325 per square foot.

Despite vacancies, the retail complex and garage sees plenty of foot traffic from tourists and some locals because it claims the city’s only In-N-Out Burger location.

A PropertyShark listing over the summer showed 18 empty shops, ranging from several hundred square feet to 12,000 square feet. It’s not clear what BH plans for the property.

Brooks said BH, which owns 10 million square feet of shops and restaurants in 18 states, is closely watching distressed properties with the goal of acquiring their loans — and ultimately assuming ownership, according to the Business Times.

That could potentially make BH a player in San Francisco’s troubled office market. Office properties, many tied to loans maturing over the next year, have begun to trade at major discounts from values prior to the pandemic.

— Dana Bartholomew