555 Fulton, the building above the Hayes Valley Trader Joe's: six closings this year at $1,152 a foot, flat on last year and 4 percent under its 2020 high

555 Fulton is the building most of Hayes Valley knows from the ground floor. Six condominiums closed between January 1 and October 15, 2026, against five in the same window of 2025; $6,160,000 of volume against $6,845,000. The median sale is $937,500 and the median price per square foot is $1,152, against $1,185 last year, and 4 percent under the building's high of $1,195 in 2020, the year its first sales recorded.

Three one-bedrooms sold at a median of $750,000 and $1,099 a foot, three two-bedrooms at $1,400,000 and $1,206. The high sale is #432, a 1,167-square-foot two-bedroom at $1,415,000 on July 21, into contract in five days; #211, 1,161 square feet, closed at $1,400,000 on September 17 after 42 days. The low is #301, 716 square feet at $720,000. The median listed sale took 27 days against 49 last year, and two of five went inside two weeks against none.

One paired resale is on record: #219, bought in March 2021 for $799,000 and sold on April 14 for $775,000, down 3 percent. The thin resale table is a feature of this building: about three-quarters of its 105 original sales were handled off the MLS, so many units have a recorded price but no listing history (The Front Steps).

The building is five stories and 139 units by Fulton Street Ventures, a subsidiary of R&F Properties, which also served as its own general contractor; it was delayed more than a year after the developer swapped the approved curtain wall for an unapproved import and was made to replace it (SF Chronicle). In August 2023 the parent company, Z&L Properties, pleaded guilty to honest-services wire fraud over payments to the city's public-works director to move the project's approvals, and paid a $1 million fine (U.S. Attorney, N.D. Cal.). One transfer under $300,000 is left out of every median above.

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at 555 Fulton 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 555 Fulton since June 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 $1,195 in 2020 (7 closings). 2026 year to date stands at $1,152.

By bedroom count, 2025 against 2026

Every closing in 2026

All 6 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.

Fulton and Laguna, the Hayes Valley edge

The building backs onto Birch Street and faces the Ammel Park cooperative, an affordable rental development, across Fulton; the site straddles the line between Hayes Valley and the Western Addition (SF Chronicle). The 13,000-square-foot Trader Joe's in its base opened on May 17, 2024 after legislation by then-Supervisor Breed allowed a chain grocer on the parcel; the commercial space had been sold by Z&L for $7.2 million the previous autumn (Hoodline; Bisnow). The Hayes Valley Playground, two blocks west at Hayes and Buchanan, was rebuilt for $3.9 million with a living-roof clubhouse (Trust for Public Land).

The grocery question runs the other way four blocks north: the Fillmore Safeway at 1335 Webster closed in February 2025, three replacement grocers walked away, and in July 2026 Supervisor Mahmood proposed a tax on vacant grocery sites while Align Real Estate plans 1,800 homes on the lot (SF Standard). No AI office of any size is within walking distance; the office figures in the paragraphs below describe SoMa, a mile and a half east.

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