The shuttered San Francisco Centre at 865 Market St. is taking new buyer bids on Sept. 9 after a March deal collapsed in July. A restructured ground lease with the school district — now running to 2082 at reduced rent — is what cleared the way.

On the Market Street face of 865 Market — the nine-story vertical mall at Fifth that spent decades as the San Francisco Centre and, before that, Westfield — the doors have been locked since January 24th. What's changed this month isn't the building. It's the paperwork. The property is taking new buyer bids on September 9th, according to the broker running the sale, CBRE, whose team member Kati Thabit posted the date on LinkedIn. The San Francisco Business Times first reported the timing.

This is the second time the roughly 1.2-million-square-foot complex has gone looking for an owner in a year. In March, the mortgage trust that controls the mall selected Prado Group and Presidio Bay Ventures — two San Francisco developers — as the winning bidders. On July 8th, the pair walked. "After extensive diligence and thoughtful evaluation, we are not currently moving forward with the transaction," Prado and Presidio Bay said in a joint statement reported by the San Francisco Standard. Neither firm named a specific reason, and none has been confirmed; the Standard reported that a ground-lease negotiation and competing bondholder interests were suspected obstacles.

That ground lease is the part worth slowing down on, because it explains why the sale can restart at all. San Francisco Unified School District owns the parcel beneath the building — about 75,675 square feet of dirt under the tower — on a lease signed in 1983 that was set to expire in 2043 at roughly $3.2 million a year. Whoever buys the mall doesn't own that ground; they inherit the obligation to pay rent on it. This month, ownership extended the lease with the district through 2082 and, in Thabit's words, "significantly reduced the annual ground lease payments, enhancing the property's long-term economics." The new figure wasn't disclosed. SFUSD and CBRE did not immediately respond to requests for comment reported by the Chronicle.

How the mall got here is by now a familiar downtown ledger. Nordstrom left in 2023 after 35 years; Bloomingdale's, around 339,000 square feet, cleared out in March 2026. Prior owners Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield and Brookfield stopped paying on a 2016 loan, and after an auction drew no outside bids, the lender trust took title in November 2025 — a credit bid a long way down from the roughly $1.2 billion the property carried in 2016. By January the last tenants, Panda Express and the Executive Order bar among them, were gone.

Walk past the Fifth and Market corner tomorrow and nothing will look different: dark glass, a sealed BART entrance, the Emporium dome over an empty floor. The only thing moving is a deadline, three weeks out, for someone to name a price.