999 16th Street: three lofts closed this year at $816 a foot, all inside two weeks, next to the Flower Market's new home

999 16th Street has six lofts and sold three of them this year, every one inside two weeks. Three closed between January 1 and October 15, 2026, against one in the same window of 2025; $3,585,000 of volume against $840,000. The median sale is $1,210,000 and the median price per square foot is $816, against $757 last year and $881 for the two 2025 sales; the record on this site begins in December 2020 and has never had five closings in a year.

The high sale is #7, a 1,760-square-foot two-bedroom at $1,400,000 on September 18, after ten days. #15, a 1,481-square-foot one-bedroom, closed at $1,210,000 on May 4 after seven days; it was bought in December 2020 for $1,100,000, so its owner gained 10 percent in five and a half years, and it is the year's one paired resale. The low is #6, 1,195 square feet at $975,000 on May 6, after eleven days.

The building dates from 1998, timber construction with exposed steel, 13- to 17-foot ceilings, skylights, a shared roof deck and an assigned garage with EV charging (Rentable).

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at 999 16th 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 999 16th St since December 2020, 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 $816 a square foot.

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.

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.

16th Street at the foot of Potrero Hill

The block changed in 2025: the San Francisco Flower Market, in business at Sixth and Brannan since 1956, opened its new 100,000-square-foot home at 901 16th Street in January and held its grand opening on April 16 (Nichi Bei). At Pennsylvania and 17th, a six-story, 64-unit building is planned at 98 Pennsylvania beside the 280 ramps (SF YIMBY).

The 2026 news on this side of the hill is about venues and a campus. Thee Parkside at 1600 17th Street, whose building passed to a developer after its owner's death, ends live music in late March 2026 with condominiums planned for the site; Bottom of the Hill at 17th and Missouri announced in January that it closes on New Year's Eve 2026 (Axios; Potrero View). Vanderbilt University announced on January 13, 2026 that it is taking over the California College of the Arts campus in the Design District, opening in fall 2027 with more than a thousand students (KTVU). The nearest AI leases are the Design District's, Scale AI at 650 Townsend and the Amazon Robotics talks reported there in June, and OpenAI's Mission Bay buildings across the 280 ramps (SFist; CompStak).

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