Clay Hill: three one-bedrooms closed this year at $1,008 a foot, from $550,000 to $720,000, a block below Huntington Park

Clay Hill is where Nob Hill sells for under $750,000. Three condominiums closed in the complex between January 1 and October 15, 2026, on $1,988,000 of volume; nothing closed in 2025, and two units closed in 2024 at $1,064 a foot. All three are one-bedrooms at 1260 Clay: #302 at $720,000 on October 6 after 20 days, #303, 610 square feet, at $718,000 on August 10 after seven, and #301, 655 square feet, at $550,000 on April 28 after 16.

The median sale is $718,000 and the median price per square foot is $1,008, 15 percent under the complex's high of $1,186 in 2021, its busiest year with six closings. The median listed sale took 16 days to contract, and one of three went inside two weeks. No unit that closed in 2026 has a prior recorded sale, so there is no paired-resale table; one transfer under $300,000 is left out of every median.

The complex is three mid-century buildings from 1950 sharing a Clay Hill owners' association, with secure entries, on-site laundry and common roof decks that look to Coit Tower, the Transamerica Pyramid and the Bay Bridge; 1250 Clay is a 24-unit elevator building, and dues run $850 a month on a one-bedroom (listing, 1250 Clay #301; listing, 1250 Clay #103). A 575-square-foot one-bedroom at 1260 Clay rents for $3,400 a month (Apartment List).

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at Clay Hill between January 1 and October 15, 2026, set against January 1 to October 15, 2025. Days on market is median days from listing to contract on MLS-listed sales; "under 15 days" counts how many of those went into contract inside two weeks.

Year by year

Every recorded closing at Clay Hill since June 1998, by calendar year. 2026 runs through October 15, 2026. Days on market is available for MLS-listed sales from 2020 onward.

The building's highest median price per square foot in any year with five or more closings was $1,186 in 2021 (6 closings). 2026 year to date stands at $1,008.

By bedroom count, 2025 against 2026

Every closing in 2026

All 3 closings through October 15, 2026, highest price first. Square footage and days on market are as recorded on the MLS; county-recorded transfers that never listed show no days.

Clay Street, below Huntington Park

Directly across the street is 1259 Clay, a two-unit condominium building finished in 2023 whose lower unit sold for $995,000 after 210 days (MLSListings). Huntington Park, with the Fountain of the Tortoises, is one block up, Grace Cathedral beside it, and the California Street cable cars two blocks south (listing, 1250 Clay #301). The Big 4 reopened inside the Huntington Hotel in July 2026 after the hotel's six-year closure (Axios).

No AI office of any size is within walking distance of the hill; the nearest is Databricks' 150,000 square feet at One Sansome, downhill in the Financial District (Bisnow).

The timetable that every South of Market building now sits inside is the public-offering calendar. Anthropic filed a confidential draft registration with the SEC on June 1, 2026, a week after a funding round that set its valuation at $965 billion (TechCrunch). As of this week the Standard reports the Anthropic listing has been pushed to November, after the midterms, that OpenAI's has moved to 2027, and that Anthropic is weighing a lockup longer than the usual six months (SF Standard). The same piece carries a Redfin estimate that current and former OpenAI and Anthropic employees could in theory buy close to a third of the metro area's homes with their proceeds, and the counter-argument from UC Berkeley's Enrico Moretti and the Bay Area Council's Jeff Bellisario that the money is concentrated in fewer hands than past booms and that these firms create fewer jobs per dollar because so much goes to data centers rather than headcount. The record in this report ends on October 15. None of it reflects a single share that has been sold.

Two citywide facts frame every building figure here. First, the office recovery is lopsided: CBRE put Q3 2026 vacancy at 27.7 percent citywide, down 6.6 points in a year, but Avison Young splits that into roughly 12 percent for Class A and north of 31 percent for Class B, and a Presidio Bay executive told Bisnow the headline number is misleading for that reason (Bisnow). Second, the condo market is still digging out: the Chronicle's May analysis found that only eight Bay Area ZIP codes showed inflation-adjusted condo gains over the year, all of them in San Francisco, and that Noe Valley's typical condo remained close to $400,000 below its 2019 level in real terms (SF Chronicle).

How this was counted

Two records feed this review. The MLS layer is one row per listing and carries days on market and square footage. The county layer reaches back further and catches transfers that never listed, but records the same closing once per data source, so the two were merged on unit, date and price and each closing kept once. Below-market-rate units and transfers under $300,000 are listed but excluded from every median. "Same window" means January 1 to October 15 of each year. Nothing here is a valuation of any unit, and nothing here is advice.

Tim McMullen · CA DRE #02016832
[email protected] · (415) 691-9272