The Royal at 201 Sansome: three closings this year at $1,003 a foot in the 1909 Royal Insurance Building, two of them without listing, two blocks from Databricks

The Royal is a 1909 landmark that became condominiums in 2006, and this year its per-foot figure passed the conversion price. Three condominiums closed at 201 Sansome Street between January 1 and October 15, 2026, against one in the same window of 2025; $2,373,000 of volume against $1,325,000. The median sale is $660,000 and the median price per square foot is $1,003, against $862 for last year's one sale and $893 in 2006, when five of the original buyers closed; the record has had fewer than five sales in every year since, so 2006 stands as the only peak it can be measured against, and this year is above it.

Two of the three never listed. #702, a 985-square-foot two-bedroom, closed at $1,090,000 on September 3; it was bought in July 2020 for $1,190,000, so its owner sold at a loss of 8.4 percent, and it is the high sale of the year and the one paired resale. #401, 658 square feet, closed at $660,000 on February 17. The low is #303, a 622-square-foot one-bedroom at $623,000 on March 13, which took 173 days.

The building is the Royal Insurance Company's 1907 to 1909 headquarters by Howells and Stokes of New York, San Francisco Landmark 160, with a façade of white marble, red brick and green and white terra cotta carrying the company's lion-and-unicorn clock and the Liver bird of Liverpool; New Urban-era conversion plans by Heller Manus turned eleven office floors into 46 residences in 2006, with sales opening in April that year from $430,000 for a one-bedroom, including five below-market-rate units and four two-story townhouses (Wikipedia); NoeHill; Heller Manus; SocketSite). A third of the units were still unsold in July 2007, and #301, sold that year for $625,000, was relisted at $429,000 by the end of 2010 (SocketSite). Dues run $1,011 a month (RubyHome).

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at 201 Sansome St 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 201 Sansome St since July 2006, 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 $893 in 2006 (5 closings). 2026 year to date stands at $1,003.

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.

Paired resales

Units that closed in 2026 and had a prior recorded sale in the same building. The change is gross, before any improvements, fees or carrying costs.

0 of these resold above the prior price, 1 below.

Sansome and Pine, the Financial District

Across the street are the Four Seasons at Embarcadero and the old Pacific Coast Stock Exchange building, which the north-facing units look onto; valet parking is directly across Sansome (listing, #403; RubyHome). Two blocks south at One Sansome, Databricks signed 150,000 square feet for its headquarters in March 2024, the largest AI lease in the district; Rippling took 123,000 square feet at 430 California in 2025, and Kirkland and Ellis and Dodge and Cox renewed 153,000 and 125,000 at 555 California (Bisnow; SF Chronicle).

Four blocks north, Jackson Square holds LoveFrom's buildings and, through its merger with io, OpenAI's foothold, with Anthropic's first 7,000-square-foot office in the district in 2021 (The Real Deal). Anthropic's Howard Street buildings are four blocks south and east, beginning at 342 Howard (Business Wire).

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