A historic San Francisco church that was previously purchased using money from a Russian oligarch with ties to President Vladimir Putin will hit the auction block in just over a month—and it’s being offered at a bargain-basement price.
Bidding will start at $1.5 million, a far cry from the church’s $7 million price earlier this year.
Colliers, which is listing the property, describes it as an “exceptional portfolio offering” and a “rare opportunity to invest.” But the drop in price likely reflects the challenges of selling such an unusual building in San Francisco, a city where zoning rules, sky-high prices and regulatory red tape make it difficult to repurpose buildings.
Known as Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, the stunning white Catholic sanctuary located at 906 Broadway in the Russian Hill neighborhood, has had a bizarre history.
After welcoming the faithful for decades, it closed its doors in the 1990s. By 2015, Supervisor Aaron Peskin was working on turning the building into a homeless shelter.
Then, in 2016, venture firm GVA Capital purchased the church for $7 million. Of that sum, $5 million came from Suleyman Kerimov, one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen and a member of the country’s upper house of parliament, The Standard found in a November 2022 investigation.
Kerimov is a close ally of Putin and has ties to a financial network believed to hold the Russian leader’s wealth, according to the European Union and previous reporting by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Pavel Cherkashin, the Bay Area-based Russian businessman behind GVA Capital, aimed to convert the former house of worship into a startup incubator and tech event space called the Startup Temple. The plan fit into a broader vision of tech culture as a religious experience that Cherkashin outlined in a 2017 column in App Developer Magazine.
But there were bumps in the road.
In 2018, the Department of Treasury added Kerimov to its sanctions list and later froze $1 billion of his U.S. assets, including a Delaware trust involved in the church’s purchase.
Meanwhile, Cherkashin struggled to navigate San Francisco’s dense forest of zoning regulations, and the Startup Temple failed to turn a profit. Shortly before it fell into foreclosure in 2020, the temple was planning to host weddings and school proms.
In March, Lightstone Capital purchased the property during a judicial foreclosure sale and later listed it with Colliers.
Besides the church itself, the property also includes a two-story residential building at 908 Broadway that currently functions as a co-living space.
Bidding will begin on Nov. 13 and run through Nov. 15.