The Francesca, 850 Powell, the 1920s doorman building next to 840 Powell: one closing this year, a 1,808-square-foot three-bedroom listed at $1,250,000 and sold at $1,190,000 after 82 days, $658 a foot

The Francesca sold one condominium this year, a three-bedroom at the lowest per-foot figure on its block. One unit closed at 850 Powell Street between January 1 and October 15, 2026, against two in the same window of 2025; $1,190,000 of volume against $1,915,000. The price per square foot is $658, against $721 on last year's pair, $636 in 2024, $676 across three sales in 2023, $1,002 across two in 2018 and $966 across two in 2015, when a $2,700,000 sale set the building's high.

#202, a 1,808-square-foot three-bedroom with a fireplace, a butler's pantry and a service elevator, was listed on October 3, 2025 at $1,250,000, went pending on December 26 and closed at $1,190,000 on February 8 after 82 days, with one assigned parking space by seniority; its dues run $2,344 a month and cover the door person, electricity, gas, heat, insurance and water; the listing record shows it sold at $482,500 in October 1996, a pairing the site's record does not hold (Redfin). The building's #502, bought at $1,275,000 in October 2019, resold at $1,222,600 in 2023, and #403 sold at $2,500,000 after a 2015 remodel (SocketSite; Joel Goodrich).

The building is a nine-story 1920s doorman building of 40 condominiums of 830 to 2,822 square feet, with doormen from 7 in the morning to 11 at night, a roof deck and board approval for buyers; the listing records give 1920, 1923 and 1929 as the year, the public record 1978, and the building record on this site 1978 and 25 units (RubyHome; Redfin; Joel Goodrich).

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at 850 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 850 Powell St since September 1999, 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 $658 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.

Powell Street, between California and Sacramento

Next door is 840 Powell, the 15-unit 1914 Beaux Arts building that sold two full-floor homes this year at $3,795,000 and $4,250,000, and at the California corner the University Club, for which the Board of Supervisors initiated landmark designation on April 28, 2026 (RubyHome, 840 Powell; Board of Supervisors). Around the corner at 842 California, between Powell and Sacramento, building and demolition permits were filed in December 2025 for a nine-story, 33-condominium building by Cass Calder Smith Architecture for Acme Development, five of the homes affordable (SF YIMBY). The Huntington Hotel at Taylor and California reopened in March 2026 after about six years closed (SF Standard).

No AI office of any size is on Nob Hill; the nearest are Hex's 20,000 square feet at 100 Montgomery, signed March 30, 2026, and Databricks at One Sansome, and the office figures in the paragraphs below describe SoMa (Traded; 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