The Oriental Warehouse at 650 Delancey: six lofts closed this year at $1,009 a foot inside an 1867 brick shell, against one in the same window of 2025

The Oriental Warehouse had its busiest year since 2020. Six lofts closed at 650 Delancey Street between January 1 and October 15, 2026, against one in the same window of 2025 and one for all of last year; $9,330,000 of volume. The median sale is $1,452,500 and the median price per square foot is $1,009, against $868 for last year's single sale and the building's high of $1,142 in 2020, the last year with five or more closings.

Nothing small sold. The low sale of the year, #103, is a 1,457-square-foot one-bedroom at $1,225,000 on October 7, and the four two-bedrooms went at a median of $1,677,500 and $1,110 a foot. The high is #203, 1,619 square feet at $1,950,000 on September 17 after 46 days. The median listed sale took 25 days to contract, and one of five went inside two weeks.

One paired resale is on record: #216, bought in March 2020 for $1,815,000 and sold on May 24 for $1,875,000, up 3.3 percent in six years, after 25 days. The per-foot figure on that sale, $1,198, is the highest of the six.

The building is the Pacific Mail Steamship Company's warehouse of 1867, built to hold coffee, tea, rice and silk, and used to process Chinese and Japanese immigrants until Angel Island opened in 1910; it became San Francisco Landmark 101 in 1977, survived an eight-year preservation fight, a 1989 earthquake that left its brick walls unsafe and a 1995 roof fire, and was rebuilt in 1996 by Fisher-Friedman Associates as a new structure set 15 feet inside the brick shell, with 66 live-work lofts of 1,350 to 1,800 square feet (Wikipedia; SocketSite; The Front Steps). It is the company's only remaining property in the city (SF Planning).

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at Oriental Warehouse 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 Oriental Warehouse since January 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 $1,142 in 2020 (5 closings). 2026 year to date stands at $1,009.

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.

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

Delancey Street, South Beach

Delancey is the short street between Brannan and the Embarcadero behind 200 Brannan, and the Oriental Warehouse shares it with the Cape Horn Lofts at 540 Delancey, an 1892 warehouse converted in 1997 (SocketSite). South Beach Harbor Park and Pier 40 are at the foot of Townsend, one block south, with Oracle Park beyond (Port of San Francisco). The Port is in exclusive negotiations with Strada and Trammell Crow on Piers 30-32 and the seawall lot across the Embarcadero at Bryant, where a 568-unit tower was formally proposed in May 2026 (SF Port; SF YIMBY).

A 36-story, 260-unit condominium tower is proposed one block west at 329 Bryant (Mission Local). The nearest large AI lease is Sierra's 258,000 square feet at 185 Berry, a few blocks west across the Caltrain tracks; Anthropic's Howard Street buildings are seven blocks north (McCarthy Cook; 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