Hawthorne Place, 77 Dow Place, the 2002 concrete lofts off Second Street: one transfer this year, a 1,189-square-foot bi-level at $695,000 off the MLS, $585 a foot, in a building that sold five in 2024

Hawthorne Place's one sale this year came through the recorder at the lowest per-foot figure in its record. One condominium transferred at 77 Dow Place between January 1 and October 15, 2026, against three in the same window of 2025; $695,000 of volume against $2,247,000. The price per square foot is $585, against $689 on last year's three, $682 across the five sales of 2024, $674 in 2023, $806 across four in 2022, $766 across the six of 2021, the most in any year, and $844 on the one 2018 sale, the building's high.

#302, a 1,189-square-foot bi-level one-bedroom with 17-foot ceilings and concrete columns, transferred at $695,000 on July 20 with no listing; the listing record shows it sold at $925,000 in November 2018, $915,000 in 2016 and $815,000 in 2014, pairings the site's record does not hold, and its 2025 assessed value was $1,031,849 (Redfin). The same stack's #502, also 1,189 square feet, closed at $710,000 with assessments of $1,153 a month, #1304, a 1,065-square-foot penthouse loft, at $880,000, and #307 is listed at $849,000 by its original owner with dues of $1,209 (Sereno, #502; Sereno, #1304; RubyHome, #307).

The building dates from 2002, poured concrete lofts with floor-to-ceiling windows by Kotas/Pantaleoni Architects on the Dow Place alley off Second Street, with unit numbers on odd floors only for the double-height plans; the listing records count 64 to 83 units, and the building record on this site lists 25 (Yerba Buena Partnership; 7x7; RubyHome).

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at Hawthorne Place 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 Hawthorne Place since February 2003, 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 $766 in 2021 (6 closings). 2026 year to date stands at $585.

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.

Dow Place, off Second Street

Dow Place appears on the 1887 Sanborn map as the alley beside the 1869 Second Street cut, which left Henry Halleck's house at 326 Second fifty feet above the new roadway until it was lowered to Folsom in 1878; in February 2026 the historian Woody LaBounty found the alley easy to walk, delivery trucks aside (San Francisco Story). The lofts overlook the 350 Second Street parking lot, proposed in 2016 for a 21-story, 480-room hotel and downsized in 2018, and two blocks north at 655 Folsom, permit activity in April 2025 revived a 14-story apartment plan on the Canton Dim Sum House site (SocketSite; SocketSite; SF YIMBY).

The nearest AI offices are Harvey's roughly 150,000 square feet at 201 Third, two blocks west, and Anthropic's Howard Street buildings three blocks north, which #307's listing cites as the neighborhood's draw (SF Standard; RubyHome, #307).

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