A permit filed August 7 to remove an elevator lobby door and hang a smoke curtain on the 4th floor of 149 New Montgomery is booked at $1 — a revision to a $1.19 million office buildout issued July 24. Together they're the paper trail of the redevelopment TMG Partners promised when it took the foreclosed building last year.

On the 4th floor of 149 New Montgomery Street, someone is taking out an elevator lobby door. The permit, filed August 7, also calls for a smoke curtain above the elevator, partition changes, and a new lighting layout — the kind of interior fussing that never draws a crowd. The city logs its estimated cost at $1.

That dollar figure is the tell. In San Francisco's permit file, a nominal $1 almost always marks a revision — an addendum whose real cost is booked on a parent permit filed earlier. And at 149 New Montgomery, the parent is not small. On July 24 the Building Department issued permit 202607245564, an alterations permit valued at $1,193,158. Ten days before that, on July 14, a separate alterations permit came in at $1,130,000. The August 7 filing is the second $1 revision this month; another landed August 5. Read in order, the stack describes a real office buildout, now down to fire-and-life-safety details: which door comes out, where the smoke curtain hangs.

What makes a million-dollar office fit-out worth noticing is the building it's happening in. 149 New Montgomery is a six-story brick-and-timber structure, built in 1907 with two upper floors added in the 1930s — roughly 78,000 square feet in the South Financial District, a four-minute walk from the Salesforce Transit Center. It was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and seismically rebuilt. Monahan Pacific bought it in 1998 for $11 million and held it for a quarter century — until February 2025, when the firm defaulted on a mortgage that, with penalties, had ballooned past $25 million, according to the San Francisco Standard. A 2024 appraisal put the building at about $20.7 million, some 40 percent below its 2014 value.

In September 2025, TMG Partners and Bridges Capital took control through a deed in lieu of foreclosure and announced a "comprehensive redevelopment" into boutique creative office. "TMG is planning renovations to enhance the creative office elements of this brick and timber building while preserving its architectural charm," Ben Kochalski, TMG's president and chief investment officer, said at the time. For most of a year that was a press release. The permits are the first evidence it's turning into drywall.

The occupancy those renovations are chasing is thin. When the building changed hands, its anchor was Werqwise, a coworking operator on some 42,000 square feet — reported closed by this summer. Ad-tech tenant Marin Software was dissolving in bankruptcy. A Cushman & Wakefield listing still shows roughly 18,000 square feet available to lease. On the ground floor, Café Madeleine has held its corner for years; the Standard reported last summer it was negotiating a renewal.

So the work on the 4th floor is a bet — that a foreclosed 1907 building, re-priced by the downturn, can be cut up for the tech, AI, and professional-services tenants its new owners keep naming. Walk past 149 New Montgomery today and there's nothing to see: the awning is the same, Café Madeleine's tables are out front. The change is four stories up, in a permit that costs a dollar.