Opera Plaza: five closings this year at $707 a foot, the lowest per-foot building in this series and the first year it has risen since 2020

Opera Plaza is the cheapest building per square foot in this series, and this is the first year since 2020 that its annual figure has not fallen. Five condominiums closed at 601 Van Ness Avenue between January 1 and October 15, 2026, against seven in the same window of 2025; $3,785,000 of volume against $4,670,000. The median sale is $795,000 and the median price per square foot is $707, flat on last year's $703 in the same window and up from $657 for all of 2025, which capped five straight annual declines from $910 in 2020. This year sits 22 percent under that high.

Only two- and three-bedrooms closed. Three two-bedrooms sold at a median of $685,000 and $707 a foot; two three-bedrooms at $835,000 and $725. The high sale is #69, a 1,175-square-foot three-bedroom at $875,000 on July 24 after nine days. #18, 1,022 square feet, closed at $805,000 on October 3 after 13 days. The low is #67, 977 square feet at $625,000, which took 129 days. The median listed sale took 39 days against 66, and two of five went inside two weeks against one of seven.

No unit that closed in 2026 has a prior recorded sale in the building, so there is no paired-resale table. The exclusion count matters more here than anywhere else in the series: 34 transfers under $300,000 are left out of every median, and in a 450-unit complex with studios from 442 square feet, many of those are market-rate studios rather than deed-restricted units. The medians above describe the larger homes.

The complex is John Carl Warnecke's 1982 urban village, built by Cahill Contractors over an entire city block: 450 condominiums above 72,500 square feet of retail and 22,700 of offices, with a 600-space garage, a pool, spa, sauna, racquetball and tennis courts, and dues that include earthquake insurance, cable and electricity (PCAD; Northmarq; RubyHome). Dues on a 749-square-foot one-bedroom run $1,285 a month (listing, #801).

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at Opera Plaza 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 Opera Plaza since January 2020, 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 $910 in 2020 (6 closings). 2026 year to date stands at $707.

By bedroom count, 2025 against 2026

Every closing in 2026

All 5 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.

Van Ness between Turk and Golden Gate

The ground floor is its own block: Max's Opera Café, Peet's, the Landmark Opera Plaza cinema, which reopened in November 2021 with four screens after a $1.2 million renovation, and office tenants including Kaiser Occupational Health, the Merola Opera Program and the Hand Center of San Francisco (Northmarq; Hoodline). The War Memorial Opera House, Herbst Theatre, Davies Symphony Hall and SFJAZZ are within three blocks, and a British gastropub, Dingles, opened at the Inn at the Opera in November 2025 (SFist).

Van Ness itself got its bus rapid transit lanes in April 2022, and in April 2025 the Board of Supervisors lifted the formula-retail ban on the avenue (SFist; SFist). No AI office of any size is within walking distance; the office figures in the paragraphs below describe SoMa and the Financial District, a mile east.

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