The Clay-Jones, Albert Larsen's 1930 tower at the top of Nob Hill: one closing this year, a half-floor one-bedroom at $1,500,000 after one day, $1,200 a foot, against $1,053 on last year's four sales

The Clay-Jones sold one condominium this year, in a day, after a 2025 in which five closed. One unit closed at 1250 Jones Street between January 1 and October 15, 2026, against four in the same window of 2025; $1,500,000 of volume against $4,990,000. The price per square foot is $1,200, against $1,053 on last year's four, $1,286 across the four sales of 2024, when a $7,250,000 sale set the building's high, $1,435 across the five of 2021, the most in any year, and $1,559 on the one 2020 sale.

#903, a 1,250-square-foot one-bedroom with two baths, one of three units on its floor, with 13 windows facing south, west and north, formal living and dining rooms and original dentil moldings, closed at $1,500,000 on January 9 after one day; the building's dues include all utilities, with #503's running $940 a month for doorman, parking, cable and storage; the listing record shows #903 sold at $1,405,000 in September 2014, $799,000 in 2003 and $1,128,000 in 2000, pairings the site's record does not hold (Redfin; Sereno, #503). The duplex penthouse #1901, 3,897 square feet, has been marketed at $8,500,000 (Joel Goodrich).

Albert Herman Larsen designed the tower, built from 1927 and opened on March 1, 1930, 22 stories of Art Deco with a 121-foot antenna, 24-hour doormen and a restaurant in the former staff quarters; Larsen lived in it, and its condominium map, recorded March 7, 1973, was one of the city's early conversions; the listing records count 43 to 45 units, and the building record on this site lists 44 (Joel Goodrich; RubyHome; Skydb).

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at Clay Jones 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 Clay Jones since October 1986, 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 $1,435 in 2021 (5 closings). 2026 year to date stands at $1,200.

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.

Clay and Jones, the top of Nob Hill

Huntington Park and Grace Cathedral are a block and a half east, close enough for the cathedral's bells, and the 1-California runs a block south (Sereno). The Huntington Hotel at Taylor and California reopened in March 2026 after about six years dark, with Ken Fulk's redesign, the Big Four restaurant and 143 rooms under Greg Flynn's ownership group (SF Standard). On the block, 1373 Clay, the Krabbenschmit building, filed plans in June 2026 for a two-story addition of six units by Geiszler Architects, and a block north at 1320 Washington, between Jones and Leavenworth, a 79-foot, 23-unit Handel Architects building to replace a two-story garage was revived in October 2026 (SF YIMBY, Jun 2026; SF YIMBY, Oct 2026).

No AI office of any size is on Nob Hill; the nearest downtown leases 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