A distressed landmark office building in downtown Oakland that opened a century ago as a luxury hotel has found a buyer.
The 11-story Leamington building at Franklin and 19th streets sold to local businessman Ed Hemmat. The seller was CIT Bank, which seized the 118,000-square-foot property in early 2025 after Stockbridge Real Estate fell behind on a $35.5 million loan it backed.
The $14.4 million purchase price was considerably below what the historic building changed hands for a decade ago, when Harvest Properties forked over $19.1 million for it and funded renovations before selling its stake to Stockbridge in 2019, according to CoStar sale notes.
On the other hand, the price of around $122 per square foot came in higher than several bargain-basement office deals done in post-pandemic Oakland in the past year or so, as the San Francisco Bay Area’s second city has continued to struggle with concerns about crime, shuttering businesses and a cash-strapped city government.
Still, a few local investors are taking advantage of the discounts and betting that the real estate pendulum in Oakland will soon swing upward again, particularly as neighboring San Francisco basks in a rebound, thanks in large part to the excitement surrounding the artificial intelligence industry.
The Leamington Hotel, as it was then called, opened in 1926 in a previous era of growth and optimism, when Oakland blossomed as a 20th-century industrial city thanks to railroads and shipbuilding. The Spanish-style hotel designed by renowned architect W.H. Weeks cost over $2 million — a large sum at the time — and hosted high-profile travelers including aviator Amelia Earhart and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in the property’s early days.
The Leamington had a brief second life in the 1960s as a rock concert venue, hosting bands like The Grateful Dead. After closing in bankruptcy in 1981, it was converted to offices and shops two years later by a partnership of the city and a local developer.
Upgrades to the building undertaken a decade ago included restoring the ornate, terra cotta exterior and Beaux Arts details and overhauling the interior with modern office amenities including skylights and bike storage. The building is blocks from Oakland’s Paramount and Fox theaters and Lake Merritt, and about a 10-minute commute from downtown San Francisco via public transit.
Those attributes are surely not lost on investors who’ve nabbed deals on office buildings that in some cases traded hands for far more money just a few years ago.
In late 2024, a distressed 15-story office tower at 180 Grand Ave. in Oakland that had changed hands for $175 million five years earlier sold to San Francisco-based Lakeside Group and Rubicon Point Partners for around $30 million. Kaiser Permanente, one of Oakland’s largest employers, sold 1950 Franklin St., a mostly vacant 21-story box overlooking Lake Merritt that once housed the healthcare giant’s executive team, along with a neighboring parking garage, to the Behring Cos. for about $14.4 million, about $20 per square foot.
Last year, Frontline Realty Capital snapped up a distressed 10-story office building at 1440 Broadway in downtown Oakland for just over $5 million — down from its $43.5 million price tag back in 2018. A director with the firm, Christian Diggs, said that he had his eye on the early 20th century Beaux Arts building for a decade or more, and that the firm remains “very optimistic about Oakland’s long-term outlook.”
The city’s fortunes remain tied to San Francisco‘s, which during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic saw its office vacancy rate rise from the lowest in the nation to the highest, as pandemic lockdowns, remote work and layoffs among technology companies caused tenants to downsize at record levels. Now a much-lauded recovery has taken hold over the past year, fueled largely by expansions from tech companies.
Downtown Oakland is still struggling to reverse five years’ worth of vanishing businesses and an office vacancy rate that’s above 20%. “Looking ahead, while San Francisco’s leasing uptick offers a glimmer of optimism, Oakland’s fundamentals suggest a prolonged recovery,” CoStar wrote.
Hemmat is a longtime Bay Area businessman who has owned gas stations and grocery stores around the region.