3620 Cesar Chavez: the building's first three resales, the same 1,038-square-foot plan three times, and all three 2021 buyers sold at a loss

3620 Cesar Chavez is a five-year-old building whose first resales arrived this year, and all three came from the 2021 sellout. Three condominiums closed between January 1 and October 15, 2026, on $3,285,000 of volume; nothing had closed since the developer's 17 sales of 2021. The median sale is $1,175,000 and the median price per square foot is $1,132, against $1,182 in 2021, the building's high, so this year sits 4 percent under the opening price.

All three are the same 1,038-square-foot two-bedroom plan on the 03 and 04 stacks, which makes the paired table unusually clean. #503 was bought in March 2021 for $1,299,000 and sold on April 1 for $1,175,000, down 9.5 percent, after ten days. #404 was bought in June 2021 for $1,275,000 and sold on June 5 for $1,185,000, down 7.1 percent, after 14 days. #303 was bought in July 2021 for $1,150,000 and sold on July 6 for $925,000, down 19.6 percent, after 62 days. The median listed sale took 14 days to contract, and two of three went inside two weeks; dues on the plan run $768 a month (MLSListings; MLSListings).

Sternberg Benjamin Architects designed the building, first proposed in 2015 as 28 units while the Mission housing moratorium was on the ballot, approved as 24 condominiums over 761 square feet of retail and a six-car garage, and offered with its plans for $8 million in 2017 before it was built; it finished in 2020 as six floors of four units each, 538 to 1,144 square feet, with a roof deck (SocketSite; SocketSite; RubyHome).

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at 3620 Cesar Chavez 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 3620 Cesar Chavez since July 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 $1,182 in 2021 (17 closings). 2026 year to date stands at $1,132.

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, 3 below.

Cesar Chavez, where the Mission meets Noe Valley

The building sits on Cesar Chavez at the edge where the Inner Mission meets Noe Valley and Bernal Heights, on a lot that held a one-story office with an eight-car parking lot; the corporate shuttles stop half a block away (SocketSite; MLSListings). Buena Vista Horace Mann is a third of a mile away, Flynn Elementary and Lick Middle about half a mile (MLSListings). The 2026 Mission openings in the neighborhood's own ledger were Chicano Nuevo at 3355 Mission, a bar since December 2025 with food from May, and Lili Cafe at 1199 South Van Ness in June (Mission Local).

No AI office of any size is within walking distance; the nearest large lease is Thinking Machines Lab's full building at 2300 Harrison, about a mile north, and the office figures in the paragraphs below describe SoMa (SF Standard).

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