San Francisco Home Prices Jump 15% Before AI IPO Wave Hits

A house in Cow Hollow just sold for $15 million. It was listed at $7.95 million.

That's not a typo - the buyer paid nearly double asking. And the AI money driving these prices hasn't even shown up yet.

San Francisco metro home prices are up nearly 11% year over year, the fastest of any major U.S. metro. Within city limits, the jump is closer to 15%.

Bidding Wars Push Prices Past Asking

One Bay Area couple bid $300,000 over asking on a $1.3 million home in the Sunset District, and still lost by more than $250,000. The winning offer came in at $1.86 million.

A six-bedroom on Russian Hill traded for $10 million in late 2023, then sold again in April for $24 million. That's a 140% jump in roughly two and a half years.

Sellers' agents are now pricing homes well under market value on purpose, pulling in a crowd and letting the bids fly. One agent recently watched a Bernal Heights home sell for $400,000 above the second-place bid.

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AI Money Is Pouring In With Nowhere To Go

The city has about 250 single-family homes for sale right now in a metro of more than 4 million people.

Tech workers at OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest of the AI crop are pulling down multimillion-dollar bonuses and equity packages, and a handful of listings are now accepting that stock as payment.

For the first time since at least 2018, more households moved into San Francisco from other parts of the country than left. Austin - the pandemic-era darling - is now losing more residents to SF than the other way around.

And the IPO calendar hasn't really started, with OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic all lining up to go public. Each one is set to mint thousands of new millionaires, most working within a few miles of City Hall.

What To Watch

The story isn't just about San Francisco - it's a preview.

Luxury ZIP codes in the metro, where typical homes top $3 million, are up 13.4% since 2022, while ZIPs with sub-$500K homes are down 4%. Same city, two different economies.

That gap is what the K-shaped economy looks like up close. The K-shaped economy is the split where high earners keep getting richer from rising investments while everyone else gets squeezed by inflation and rates.

High earners can handle 7% mortgages, and most buyers can't. The pattern is showing up in housing markets across the country, just less dramatically than in San Francisco.

The IPO calendar will decide what happens next. If OpenAI and Anthropic price the way the private market suggests, San Francisco gets another wave of buyers with cash to burn.

The market hasn't priced in the IPOs yet. The buyers already have.

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