Shipley Square at 821 Folsom: three closings this year at $906 a foot after a 2025 with none, on the same block as the Yerba Buena Lofts

Shipley Square went a year without a sale and came back a little above its old high. Three condominiums closed at 821 Folsom Street between January 1 and October 15, 2026, on $2,723,000 of volume; nothing closed in 2025, and one unit closed in 2024 at $869 a foot. The median sale is $1,035,000 and the median price per square foot is $906, against $890 in 2021, the building's busiest year with six closings and its high in any year with five or more.

The high sale is #412, a 1,453-square-foot two-bedroom, one of four in the building with an oversized walkout patio, at $1,100,000 on May 21 after 37 days (MLSListings). #518, 1,101 square feet, closed at $1,035,000 on January 23 without listing. The low is #419, a 649-square-foot one-bedroom at $588,000 on July 7 after 23 days. The median listed sale took 23 days to contract, and one of three went inside two weeks. No unit that closed in 2026 has a prior recorded sale, so there is no paired-resale table.

The building is 80 residential and commercial condominiums mapped in December 2003 and finished in 2004, designed by BAR Architects around an interior courtyard with a shared rooftop terrace; dues run $842 to $1,007 a month (SF Board of Supervisors; MLSListings; MLSListings).

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at Shipley Square 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 Shipley Square since October 2005, 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 $890 in 2021 (6 closings). 2026 year to date stands at $906.

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.

Folsom between Fourth and Fifth

Shipley Square shares the south side of this block with Stanley Saitowitz's 200-loft Yerba Buena Lofts at 855 Folsom, both backing onto Shipley Street; the Salvation Army headquarters at 832 Folsom faces them across the street (Architecture News Plus; Starboard CRE). On Shipley itself, a seven-story, 13-unit for-sale building was filed for 173 Shipley in December 2025, and a 21-unit condominium at 233-237 Shipley was mapped in 2017 (SF YIMBY; SF Board of Supervisors). The Folsom Streetscape Project outside, a two-way protected bikeway from Second to Eleventh, is scheduled for substantial completion in October 2026, and permits for a 26-story tower at 896 Folsom were filed in December 2025 (Streetsblog; SF YIMBY).

The building's own listings name the employers two and three blocks away: ZIP, Notion, Amplitude and Harvey AI, whose 201 Third lease grew to about 150,000 square feet in April 2026, and the restaurants Benu, Papa Noodle and the Dawn Club (MLSListings; CoStar). The Anthropic buildings on Howard begin five blocks 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