655 Fifth, the 20-unit 1999 building across from Caltrain: one closing this year, a one-bedroom with two parking spaces at $815,000 without a day on the market, $25,000 under its 2021 price

655 Fifth sold one condominium this year, off a listing that was posted and withdrawn the same day. One unit closed between January 1 and October 15, 2026, against one in the same window of 2025; $815,000 of volume against $766,000. The price per square foot is $819, against $696 on last year's sale, $785 in 2023, $848 across three sales in 2022 and $862 across the three of 2021, the most in any year.

#14, a 995-square-foot one-bedroom with two baths, two covered parking spaces and an EV charger, was listed and delisted on June 27 at $825,000 and closed at $815,000 on July 28 with no days on market; its dues run $717 a month; it was bought in June 2021 for $840,000, down 3 percent, and it is the year's one paired resale; the listing record carries the unit's history to its first sale in March 2000 at $458,250 (Redfin). The listing describes the location as where SoMa and Mission Bay meet, with South Park, Marlowe and Saison nearby (Rentler).

The building dates from 1999, 20 units numbered 1 to 20 on Fifth between Brannan and Townsend; the building record on this site lists six, and 695 Fifth next door is a separate 20-unit building of the same year (Redfin street index; Redfin).

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at 655 5th 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 655 5th St since March 2021, by calendar year. 2026 runs through October 15, 2026. Days on market is available for MLS-listed sales from 2020 onward.

No year in the building's record holds five or more closings. 2026 year to date stands at $819 a square foot.

By bedroom count, 2025 against 2026

Every closing in 2026

All 1 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.

Fifth Street, between Brannan and Townsend

Caltrain is directly across the street, per the leasing brochure for the 650 Fifth office building opposite (Starboard CRE). Next door at 645 Fifth, the former San Francisco Tennis Club site, 2.6 acres bounded by Fifth, Brannan and Bluxome, became 88 Bluxome: Planning approved two residential towers of 51 and 58 floors, 599 feet and about 1,500 apartments by SCB and Henning Larsen for Strada in December 2025, after an AB 2011 streamlining determination in August, and Alexandria put the entitled site on the market at once; the 2019 office version, with a 490,000-square-foot Pinterest pre-lease, fell apart in August 2020 (SF YIMBY, Dec 2025; SF YIMBY, Aug 2025; SocketSite). Down Bluxome, permits were filed in March 2025 to rebuild the fire-destroyed 69 Bluxome warehouse with a rooftop apartment (SF YIMBY).

The nearest AI offices are Sierra's 258,000 square feet at 185 Berry and Scale AI's roughly 180,000 at 650 Townsend, where Amazon Robotics was reported in talks in June 2026, each about two blocks away (Bisnow; SFist).

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