Madrone set a building record at $1,301 a foot this year, two blocks from where Sierra just expanded to 351,000 square feet

Madrone has its best per-foot year on record. Eleven condominiums closed across the three-address complex between January 1 and October 15, against eight in the same window of 2025, at a median of $1,301 a square foot against $1,172. The building's previous high was $1,294 in 2020, on a sample of eight, so this year clears it by a small margin on a slightly larger one.

Volume rose from $13.5 million to $16.4 million. Median sale price moved from $1,564,400 to $1,530,000, the one figure that fell, and it fell because four of this year's eleven sales were one-bedrooms where last year had none; the two-bedroom median rose from $1,537,500 to $1,655,000 and from $1,168 to $1,338 a foot.

Tempo picked up. Median days on market is 15 against 25; four of nine listed sales went into contract inside two weeks against one of five. 435 China Basin #541 sold in one day, #330 in seven at $1,750,000, 420 Mission Bay #508 in three at $1,655,000. The high sale, $2,000,000 at 420 Mission Bay Boulevard on March 13, was a county-recorded transfer that never listed. The most recent closing, #411 at $1,850,000 on October 14, had a prior sale of $1,520,000 in August 2017.

Six paired resales are on record and five are up. 435 China Basin #336, bought in November 2012 for $869,000 as the building opened, sold on September 14 for $1,560,000, up 79.5 percent. 480 Mission Bay #316, bought in March 2023 for $950,000, sold for $1,467,000, up 54.4 percent — the largest gain on a post-pandemic purchase anywhere in this series. The one decline is #205, bought in April 2023 for $1,310,000 and sold in January for $1,300,000.

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at Madrone 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 Madrone since July 2012, 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 $1,301 in 2026 (11 closings). 2026 year to date stands at $1,301.

By bedroom count, 2025 against 2026

Every closing in 2026

All 11 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.

5 of these resold above the prior price, 1 below.

China Basin, right now

Madrone fronts Mission Bay Boulevard North and China Basin Street. Sierra AI's headquarters at 185 Berry, which expanded from 257,000 to 351,000 square feet in Q3 2026, is two blocks north across the channel (SF Examiner; SF Standard). OpenAI's 550 Terry Francois is three blocks east and the Exchange at 1800 Owens four blocks south (The Real Deal). Nvidia's 45,000 square feet at Mission Rock is across Third Street (SF Standard). CBRE recorded Mission Bay office asking rents near $131 a foot in Q3, an all-time high and up 49.8 percent in a year, with neighborhood vacancy at 13.2 percent at the start of 2026 against 41.2 percent two years earlier (SF Examiner).

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