In 2023, the dwindling San Francisco District of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows joined a growing list of names leaving the city’s troubled Mid-Market neighborhood. The group put its historic six-story home of more than a century up for sale, citing its shrinking membership and rising crime in the neighborhood.
Now the historic Odd Fellows Temple has a new owner, as San Francisco's nascent recovery continues to gain momentum. A private investor paid $6.75 million for the 60,000-square-foot building at the corner of Seventh and Market streets. The buyer is Ramosa, according to CoStar records, a business whose address has been tied to neurosurgeon and investor Dr. Reza Malek.
The Odd Fellows, one of the nation's oldest fraternal and philanthropic organizations, has owned and operated the property at 1101 Market St. since the original Odd Fellows Temple was erected on the property back in 1880. That building was hastily torn down in a desperate attempt to stop the fires that raged through the city after the 1906 earthquake. The group finished rebuilding the current structure in 1909, and the organization has owned and operated the structure ever since.
Today, the building serves as home to several nonprofits and artists, such as Alonzo King LINES Ballet and Richard Perri, a renowned San Francisco artist who had been a tenant there for 35 years and is also an Odd Fellow. The group was founded in 1819 “to promote friendship, love, and truth while improving communities and aiding those in need,” according to its website.
Colliers Senior Vice President Pete Mikacich represented both the buyer and the seller in the recent deal. He said marketing the “one-of-a-kind” property was challenging.
“In the end, we are extremely gratified that the new ownership is committed to preserving the unique environment that has defined this property for decades,” said Mikacich, adding that the buyer was dedicated to supporting arts and nonprofit organizations and supporting downtown San Francisco’s ongoing revitalization.
“It’s a bittersweet end of an era in many ways,” said Peter Sellars, a former Odd Fellows president and board member who also served as the building’s longtime manager, in a statement. “In recent years, the management of the building has become increasingly challenging.”
Sellars said the group was moving to a new home in the city’s Excelsior District that is more accessible to its remaining members. He told the San Francisco Chronicle last year that members were increasingly uncomfortable traveling to the area for meetings.
No-man's-land
The Mid-Market neighborhood has for decades had a reputation for being a troubled no-man’s-land plagued by open-air drug use and the selling of counterfeit goods.
Whole Foods closed its 65,000-square-foot store at Eighth and Market streets in 2023 after just a year in business. Numerous other retailers, restaurants and office tenants left the neighborhood in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. They included a CVS and a Bank of America branch that closed earlier this year on nearby South Van Ness Avenue after 66 years because of the low foot traffic.
Officials and local residents and businesses are now hoping for a turnaround, as downtown San Francisco is reviving thanks to the artificial intelligence startups flooding the city.
Across the street, another historic office building adjacent to Market Street’s legendary Warfield Theater sold at a deep discount earlier this year to the Community Arts Stabilization Trust, a San Francisco nonprofit that helps connect arts and culture groups with affordable spaces. Ken Ikeda, the group’s CEO, said the recent real estate reset had prompted communities to reevaluate the value of arts and cultural institutions and their role in building sustainable neighborhoods.
Other new opportunities could soon be blossoming in the area. Two blocks down, the city’s largest mall is for sale after languishing in limbo for some two years. CBRE is marketing the long-suffering and mostly vacant nine-story San Francisco Centre as a “unique platform for large-scale reinvention” as a mixed-use redevelopment with housing, hotels, entertainment and more.
A block away, at Sixth and Market streets, three German entrepreneurs have hatched an experimental “vertical village” for hosting cutting-edge research in such subjects as robotics, AI, longevity and cryptocurrency. The trio bought the 16-story former WeWork building at 995 Market St. earlier this year for just $11 million — far below the $62 million paid by the previous owner at the height of the city’s last tech boom.
The MidMarket office submarket has a vacancy rate of 27.5%, among the highest in the city, as of the fourth quarter of 2025. The city’s overall office vacancy of nearly 23% remains one of the nation’s highest because of factors that have prevailed since the 2020 shutdown, when workers disappeared from the city center and companies dumped space at record speeds.
On the other hand, leasing volumes reached their highest levels since 2019, with the number of new leases signed in the most recent quarter matching the average achieved during the 2010 and 2019 tech boom. In downtown San Francisco, the daytime office worker population has seen one of the biggest increases in the nation over the past year.
“Boosted by the AI sector’s strong preference for in-office collaboration and more structured hybrid working policies by large employers, the downtown area is regaining some of the vitality that made it attractive to employers and workers before the pandemic,” CoStar said in a market analysis.