81 Frank Norris: three one-bedrooms closed this year at $845 a foot, between $555,000 and $680,000, on the Polk Gulch alley renamed for a novelist

81 Frank Norris is the smallest and oldest building on this list, and three sales is a busy year for it. Three condominiums closed between January 1 and October 15, 2026, against one in the same window of 2025; $1,905,000 of volume against $550,000. All three are one-bedrooms: #705, 805 square feet on the top floor, at $680,000 on April 17 after 39 days; #201, 896 square feet, at $670,000 on March 9 after 102; and #303, 620 square feet, at $555,000 on April 7 after 41.

The median sale is $670,000 and the median price per square foot is $845. The building's record is too thin for a peak year; it has never had five closings in a year, and the one or two sales a year since 2021 ran between $892 and $1,023 a foot, so this year's three sit under them. The median listed sale took 41 days to contract, and none of the three went inside two weeks. No unit that closed in 2026 has a prior recorded sale, so there is no paired-resale table. Six transfers under $300,000 are left out of every median, a large share for a 32-unit building.

The building dates from 1913, seven stories with an elevator, 32 units, a landscaped rooftop courtyard, bike storage and dues of $724 a month that cover water, trash, sewer, insurance and the elevator (RubyHome; Century 21 listing, #701). A furnished 541-square-foot unit with parking rents for $4,000 a month (Northeastern housing listing).

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at 81 Frank Norris 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 81 Frank Norris St since October 2007, 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 — in ( closings). 2026 year to date stands at $845.

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.

Frank Norris Street, Polk Gulch

The street was renamed in 1988, one of twelve the city renamed for writers and artists after a proposal by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and it is a short side street off the Polk corridor (SF Gazetteer). The California Street cable car is a block away, as are the Trader Joe's and the Whole Foods on California; Swan Oyster Depot, Bob's Donuts and Brownies Hardware are on Polk, and Lafayette Park is a few blocks west (RubyHome; Century 21 listing, #701).

Van Ness, one block west, got its bus rapid transit lanes in April 2022 and lost its formula-retail ban in April 2025 (SFist; SFist). No AI office of any size is within walking distance; the office figures in the paragraphs below describe SoMa and the Financial District, 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