Presidio Bay is spending roughly $100 million to turn 88 Spear Street — bought for a third of its 2014 price, two-thirds empty — into what it calls the country's first "office resort." The wager is that a spa and a rooftop restaurant lease space that bare glass can't.

Two blocks from the Ferry Building, a 56-year-old office building is being gutted into a spa. When 88 Spear Street reopens — completion is now targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026, slipped from an original late-2025 date — it will carry a basement with a sauna, cold plunge and two pools, a golf simulator, an IV-therapy "Performance Lab," a ground-floor Arsicault bakery and a rooftop restaurant with Bay Bridge views. Its developer, Presidio Bay Ventures, is calling it the country's first "office resort," a phrase SFGATE's Tessa McLean reported this week alongside the pitch that offices "shouldn't feel like office buildings at all."

The number under the amenities is the more interesting one. Presidio Bay bought the building — formerly 60 Spear — from Clarion Partners in August 2023 for $40.93 million, roughly $260 a square foot and less than a third of the ~$107 million Clarion paid a decade earlier, per The Real Deal and the SF Standard. It was about two-thirds empty at purchase. Add a roughly $50 million renovation and the total bet is near $100 million, expanding the tower from 11 to 13 stories. Founder Cyrus Sanandaji is aiming at law, finance and VC tenants — "a resort concept isn't going to resonate with the hardcore 996 tech community," he told the Standard — at premium rents; one report put a lower-floor lease at a $105 starting rate.

The thesis isn't crazy. Downtown vacancy is still 27% to 30% depending on who's counting (Kidder Mathews, CBRE, Cushman), but that average hides a split: trophy space runs near 17% while unrenovated stock sits closer to 35%. Capital-improved buildings are the ones leasing. What's unproven is the amenity-resort model specifically. 88 Spear's office-floor lease-up hasn't been disclosed, and a rival play — 525 Market's "Cove," at $20 million-plus — projects a three-year break-even on $2.3 million in annual operating costs. Watch the signed-lease count before the cold plunge fills.