Matt Currie is principal at CM Commercial, an eight-person boutique real estate firm with two Bay Area offices. We talked shop at 111 Minna Gallery, his favorite coffee bar. (His go-to watering hole for a strong drink? Specs.) One unlikely CM client is Viz Media, the Japanese anime giant. He locked down the 20k SF deal this fall to bring Viz to the second floor of Market Square, joining Twitter, Yammer, and One Kings Lane. Viz's new CEO Ken Sasaki wanted to improve the culture of the company, so he started by shortening commutes; some 90% of its employees live in the city or south or east, so the new location on the Market Street transit corridor saves employees an hour of travel time a day.
Before landing at Market Square, Viz sat at 295 Bay St, a rehabbed movie theater in North Beach owned by Viz's parent, Shogakukan. CM repped the sale of the 35k SF building to WARO, who plans to lease whole site to one user ASAP (ideally, a media, ad, or tech firm would do). In its Hollywood heyday, the theater showed such flicks as the premieres of Star Wars and Platoon (we sense a new Skywalker fan club venue). Shogakukan had bought the building from the bank, which took the keys back from the developer after the dot-com bust. Matt knows a thing or two about that era; in 2000 he jumped ship from tech to real estate.
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