San Francisco real estate was not easy to access. But the record-breaking sales now taking place in the city’s luxury market are testing the upper limits of what even this storied city thought was possible.
Consider this six-bedroom, 5,700-square-foot home in Cow Hollow, one of San Francisco’s most sought-after neighborhoods. It was listed at $7.95 million two weeks ago, so it is by no means cheap. It just sold for $15 million. The seller, who purchased the property for $7.8 million in the summer of 2020 as the pandemic forced residents out of the city, has nearly doubled his money in less than six years.
San Francisco real estate agent Rohin Dhar listed X for sale, eliciting the kind of reaction you’d expect from people who think they’ve seen everything this market has to offer.
Then there’s this 4,100-square-foot home in Presidio Heights, one of the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods. The home was listed for $4.4 million in late April and sold a week later for $8.2 million, nearly double the asking price. Venture capitalist Nichole Wischoff, who toured the property before the sale, wasn’t impressed with what the money was buying.
“Ordinary house, good location,” she wrote on “Someone bought this for $8.2 million,” she wrote. “If you want to see your cash burning, take a look at SF real estate.”
It’s not just ultra-high-end products that are seeing action. A 2,300-square-foot home in Bernal Heights sold this week for $4 million, two years after the same owner tried and failed to sell it for $2.95 million. Those sales represent a different but equally telling story. The frenzy isn’t limited to rare eight-figure homes. Across the broader market, buyers are bidding aggressively, with homes regularly selling for $1 million over asking price.
The numbers back up the anecdote. New data from Redfin shows luxury home sales in San Francisco rose 22% in March compared to the same period a year ago, with home contracts lasting an average of 12 days, down from 28 days a year ago. Nearly two-thirds of luxury properties went under contract within two weeks. By contrast, non-luxury sales rose less than 4% and prices were little changed. High-end essentially operates in a completely different world.
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The invisible forces behind all this are no mystery to anyone who pays attention to the city’s technological economy. San Francisco is home to some of the world’s most valuable private companies, and their employees have quietly been amassing wealth and increasingly cashing it out.
OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the most valuable AI companies in history, have allowed employees to sell some of their shares in secondary market transactions in recent years, putting huge sums of money in the hands of people who, in many cases, already live here and want to upgrade. That liquidity is flowing directly into the housing market, and the market is responding accordingly.
The truly surprising part may still be ahead. SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic and other clusters of tech giants are not yet public. When they do – and the conventional wisdom is that some of them will sooner or later – the wealth unlocked may seem quaint in comparison to the present moment. Thousands of employees holding stakes in companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars will become more liquid almost overnight.
What this means for a housing market that has already generated $15 million in sales just one week after listing is honestly hard to fathom at this point. San Francisco has spent decades at the heart of the conversation about housing affordability. It would be strange if $15 million seemed like the first bid on the horizon.
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