Michael Shvo

Israeli-born developer Michael Shvo recalls seeing San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid building as a child and marvels now, as the building’s owner, at what it has meant to him. 

“I went back to Israel a couple years back and found a drawing I drew in 1981 of myself next to the Transamerica Pyramid,” said Shvo. “That symbolized, for me, the American dream.”

Shvo lived the dream last September, when his firm reopened the tower. He purchased the Transamerica Pyramid in October 2020 and spent $400 million renovating it. Today, the Transamerica Pyramid is 85 percent leased, and, while rents pre-renovation stood at around $60 per square foot, base rents have jumped to $115 per foot, with rents as high as $300 per foot on the building’s top floor. Moreover, Transamerica’s story seems to symbolize the story of San Francisco’s office turnaround writ large. While many dismissed the city as lost to crime and bad management, a budding tech and AI sector was looking for someone to answer its office needs.

But not strictly AI or tech. “What’s nice is that we’re not attracting one type of business — we’re attracting leaders of industries to the building,” said Shvo. “We have law, VCs, hedge funds, private equity firms, crypto firms. We just signed a massive lease with Morgan Lewis, one of the 10 top law firms in the country. They’ve been in the same office for 40 years, and they decided to move to the Transamerica Pyramid because of what we’ve done in the building.”

Shvo also signed major leases at its New York City properties, including bringing Calvin Klein to 530 Broadway for a 7,300-square-foot flagship and Parisian hospitality company Accor to 23,000 square feet of office space at 711 Fifth Avenue.

The company, too, is developing a number of luxury residential projects, including the 17-story, Peter Marino-designed tower called the Raleigh in Miami. Shvo is also behind the first stand-alone residences by Mandarin Oriental in the U.S. on New York’s Fifth Avenue, which Shvo said is achieving sales in excess of $5,000 per square foot.

Looking ahead, Shvo the man intends to acquire more of what he calls “super prime” properties, hoping to re-create the kind of splash he’s seen with the Transamerica Pyramid.

“We focus on only owning, operating and developing super prime real estate,” said Shvo. “For us, it’s not about timing the market, but about finding the right assets. There may be two years that we do nothing, not because we don’t want to acquire anything, but because we can’t find another Transamerica Pyramid. My hope is that with the current interest rate environment, we will see some opportunities in the super prime market.”