199 New Montgomery: five closings this year at $1,008 a foot, with two identical units one floor apart closing at the same $1,120,000, across Howard from two new AI tenants

199 New Montgomery produced the cleanest comparable in this series. Five condominiums closed between January 1 and October 15, 2026, against two in the same window of 2025; $4,760,000 of volume against $1,614,675. Two of them are the same 971-square-foot two-bedroom plan one floor apart: #1501 closed at $1,120,000 on July 8 without listing, and #1401 closed at $1,120,000 on September 3 after 33 days on the market. Same plan, same price, two months and one route to market apart.

The median sale is $985,000 and the median price per square foot is $1,008, against $853 in the 2025 window, an 18 percent gain, and 4 percent under the building's high of $1,050 in 2021. Three two-bedrooms sold at a median of $1,120,000 and $1,153 a foot; two one-bedrooms at $767,500 and $976. The low is #604, a 779-square-foot one-bedroom at $735,000 after 99 days. The median listed sale took 33 days to contract against 144 last year, and two of five went inside two weeks.

No unit that closed in 2026 has a prior recorded sale in the building, so there is no paired-resale table. Two transfers under $300,000 are left out of every median; the building has 25 below-market-rate units among 167 (Heller Manus).

Heller Manus designed the building for Intracorp, 16 stories over four levels of parking, inside the New Montgomery Street historic conservation district, with a masonry façade keyed to the belt courses of its 1920s neighbors and stainless sconces by Albert Paley; it sold out in a 2005 bidding round, and the roof deck has two grills and a fire pit (Heller Manus; SF Highrises; SocketSite).

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at 199 New Montgomery 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 199 New Montgomery since October 2020, 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 $1,050 in 2021 (10 closings). 2026 year to date stands at $1,008.

By bedroom count, 2025 against 2026

Every closing in 2026

All 5 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.

New Montgomery and Howard

The building stands at the corner where New Montgomery ends at Howard, with the Academy of Art University's main building at 180 New Montgomery across the street (Academy of Art). Directly across Howard is 612 Howard, a six-floor 1907 loft building that signed two AI tenants in 2025: Teambridge took about 18,000 square feet on the ground floor in April, and Greenlite AI a full floor in August (Mann Report; Business Wire). Half a block up the street, Reflection AI and A* took two floors of 140 New Montgomery in March 2026, leaving the 1925 tower with one office floor open (CBRE).

Two blocks west at Third and Howard, Harvey AI's lease at 201 Third grew to about 150,000 square feet in April 2026; two blocks east, Anthropic's 500 and 505 Howard at First Street begin a run of six buildings that ends at 300 Howard (CoStar; Bisnow). SHOJI opened at 140 New Montgomery in April 2025 and Papa Noodle at 117 the previous December (Yerba Buena Partnership). The $49 million Howard Street bikeway, from Fourth to Eleventh, does not reach this block (SFMTA).

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