840 Powell, the 1914 Beaux Arts doorman building between the Fairmont and Grace Cathedral: two full-floor homes closed this year at $3,795,000 and $4,250,000, the building's highest prices and its first sales since 2023

840 Powell had no sale in 2024 or 2025 and then sold two of its fifteen full-floor homes at the two highest prices in its record. Two condominiums closed between January 1 and October 15, 2026, on $8,045,000 of volume. The median sale is $4,022,500 and the median price per square foot is $1,315, against $739 across two 2023 sales that took a median of 184 days, $982 across two 2022 sales and $1,014 in 2012, when a $3,500,000 sale set the prior high.

#701, a 3,038-square-foot five-bedroom, closed at $3,795,000 on April 7 after seven days, $1,249 a foot. #602, a 3,077-square-foot four-bedroom, closed at $4,250,000 on August 22 after 43 days, $1,381 a foot. One of two went inside two weeks, where no sale here had since the record began. No unit that closed in 2026 has a prior recorded sale on this site, so there is no paired-resale table. The third full floor in play this year is #601, a 3,145-square-foot four-bedroom beneath the penthouse with two parking spaces, listed on August 17 at $2,995,000 and now pending; Redfin's record tags the listing a short sale, and the unit last sold in December 2012 for $2,700,000 (Redfin, #601). Dues run $3,412 to $3,425 a month and cover the doorman, the elevator, structural insurance and internet (RubyHome).

The building dates from 1914, seven stories of Beaux Arts with a full-time doorman and 15 residences, on Powell between California and Sacramento (RubyHome; Neighborhoods.com).

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at 840 Powell 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 840 Powell St since August 2004, 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 $1,315 a square foot.

By bedroom count, 2025 against 2026

Every closing in 2026

All 2 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.

Powell Street, between California and Sacramento

The California and Powell cable car stop, the Fairmont, Huntington Park, Grace Cathedral and the Tonga Room are the listing's landmarks (Redfin, #601). Next door is The Francesca, 850 Powell, a 1929 nine-story building of 40 units, and at the California corner the University Club, 800 Powell, Bliss and Faville's 1908 Italian Renaissance Revival clubhouse across from the Fairmont, for which the Board of Supervisors initiated city landmark designation on April 28, 2026 (RubyHome; Board of Supervisors resolution; Wikipedia).

No AI office of any size is within walking distance; the nearest are Databricks' 150,000 square feet at One Sansome, six blocks downhill, and the office figures in the paragraphs below describe SoMa (Bisnow).

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