Perhaps it's just a real estate investment being made by a man who's made some savvy San Francisco real estate investments in the past. But after recently selling off several SF properties he owns, Kink.com founder Peter Acworth has bought a much larger building in the city.

A building dubbed CitiCenter at 1717 Mission Street, at 13th Street, which sits beside the Central Freeway viaduct, has just changed hands for $14.9 million, and the buyer is Peter Acworth, who has not made headlines around town since selling the SF Armory and moving Kink.com's operations to Las Vegas.

As the Chronicle reports, the seller appears to have been disgraced permit expeditor Walter Wong, who became a key part of the sprawling corruption scandal that roiled City Hall and multiple city departments starting six years ago, and that resulted in the conviction of former SF Public Works director Mohammed Nuru, among others.

Wong himself was charged with fraud by the feds in June 2020, not long after his offices at 1717 Mission Street were raided, and later ordered to pay the city back $1.45 million to settle a corruption suit brought by the city itself. It appears he likely avoided jail time by taking a plea deal early on and cooperating in the investigation of Nuru, who was charged with conducting multiple pay-to-play schemes, not only with Wong.

Now it's a mystery what Acworth wants with the 80,000-square-foot, aging office building, which Wong had once envisioned as a tear-down to make way for a 165,000-square-foot life sciences campus, per the Chronicle.

Acworth also recently divested himself of several properties, including the building that housed AsiaSF at 201 Ninth Street, and mixed use buildings on Sixth Street and 21st Street. As the SF Business Times reported last month, the portfolio of buildings sold for a combined $6.7 million.

Acworth relocated his business out of the state and sold the Armory for a massive profit in 2018 — it sold for $65 million, after a significant retrofit of its former army Drill Court into a concert venue, 12 years after Acworth purchased it for $14.5 million to become the headquarters of Kink.com. But he's maintained a presence in SF, and The RealDeal notes that he owns a mansion at the corner of California and Franklin streets in Pacific Heights.

(Last we heard, in 2023, there were plans to revive the ground-floor spaces at the Armory into a jazz club, but that has not happened.)

He's reportedly continued to have some sort of easement dispute with a neighbor of another building he owns at 1799 Mission Street, the three-story building that is kitty-corner from The Armory and is home to Dahlia, the bar and club that replaced The Armory Club. A judgement against him in that case was over $300,000, but it's unclear where the dispute now stands.

Could 1717 Mission Street just be some sort of strategic flip for Acworth, who sees dollar signs when it comes to well located, newly renovated office space in the city? Or could this be the beginning of his own new venture in the city? We shall see.

Previously: By Popular Demand, Kink.com Is Holding Another Moving Sale At The Armory This Weekend