SF median home price hits record

San Francisco’s median house price hit a record $2.15 million in March 2026, beating the city’s previous peak from April 2022, and Compass said the jump was 18% from a year earlier. Condo prices climbed too, reaching $1.36 million, which was 27% higher than March 2025. (bloomberg.com) This is happening in a city that spent much of 2023 and 2024 as a symbol of tech layoffs, empty offices, and falling commercial property values. In early 2026, the rebound is showing up first in the part of the market bought by people with stock windfalls, startup equity, and cash. (aol.com) Compass chief market analyst Patrick Carlisle said the new employment and wealth from artificial intelligence startups were fueling “extremely heated market dynamics” even as war-driven volatility and higher interest rates hit other parts of the economy. That helps explain why San Francisco is acting less like a national housing market and more like a company town for one rich industry. (aol.com) The buyers showing up at the top of the market are not just bidding a little more. The San Francisco Business Times reported that luxury home sales jumped 83% in March, with some all-cash offers landing as much as 70% above asking price. (bizjournals.com) That kind of buying power lines up with what artificial intelligence companies are doing on the office side. Anthropic signed for the entire 300 Howard tower in downtown San Francisco in February 2026, a deal covering 466,000 square feet plus an adjacent 18,000 square foot building. (divcowest.com) OpenAI has been expanding too. By March 2026, reports said it had subleased roughly 280,000 square feet at the former Dropbox complex in Mission Bay, pushing its San Francisco footprint past 1 million square feet. (prismnews.com) So the housing spike is not just a story about one month of sales. It is a map of where the money is concentrating: Mission Bay, South of Market, and nearby neighborhoods where the fastest-growing artificial intelligence firms are hiring, leasing, and pulling workers back for part of the week. (aol.com) The catch is that San Francisco still has two housing markets at once. Redfin’s county-level data for January 2026 showed a median sale price around $1.3 million, far below the $2.15 million figure for houses in the Compass report, which shows how heavily the current surge is centered in scarce single-family homes and the upper end of the city. (redfin.com, bayareamarketreports.com) That split matters because a city can have empty office floors, stressed renters, and record house prices at the same time if a narrow slice of buyers gets much richer much faster than new homes get built. San Francisco has spent years underbuilding housing, so a fresh wave of well-paid engineers and founders can move prices with surprising speed. (therealdeal.com) What March 2026 shows is that the artificial intelligence boom is no longer just a stock market story or a venture capital story. In San Francisco, it is now visible in home sale records, full-building office leases, and bidding wars for houses that were already expensive before this cycle started. (bloomberg.com, divcowest.com, prismnews.com)