The Beacon's median sale jumped to $1,106,500 this year. The mix did most of that, the price per foot did the rest

The Beacon is the building where the median can mislead, so start with why. The year-to-date median sale is $1,106,500, against $710,000 in the same window of 2025. That is not a 56 percent price rise. Last year 18 of 24 market-rate closings were one-bedrooms; this year nine of 14 are two-bedrooms and one is a three-bedroom. The building sold bigger homes, so the median rose.

The number that controls for size is price per square foot, and it also rose, by less: $944 a foot year to date, against $794 in the 2025 window. That is a 19 percent gain in a year, and it leaves The Beacon 14 percent under its own 2019 high of $1,094 a foot. The building's 2025 full-year figure, $794, was the lowest in the record since 2005, so 2026 has reversed one year of a six-year slide rather than the slide.

Volume is lower: 14 closings against 21, $15.2 million against $18.4 million. The pace of the ones that did sell is faster: median 17 days on market against 28, and five of 13 listed sales went into contract inside two weeks.

The Beacon carries a large stock of below-market-rate units with income limits. Forty-one transfers in the full record fall under the $300,000 line used here, and they are left out of every median above and listed nowhere in the tables, because a deed-restricted price says nothing about the market-rate floors.

Nine paired resales are on record for 2026. The spread runs from 260 King #373, bought in 2012 for $390,000 and sold in June for $680,000, to 250 King #602, bought in 2018 for $1,420,000 and sold for $1,299,000. The 2012 buyer gained 74 percent; the 2018 buyer lost 8.5 percent. The year of purchase explains more of the table than the floor does.

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at The Beacon 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 The Beacon since May 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 $1,094 in 2019 (32 closings). 2026 year to date stands at $944.

By bedroom count, 2025 against 2026

Every closing in 2026

All 14 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.

7 of these resold above the prior price, 2 below.

King Street and the OpenAI block

The Beacon fronts King Street across from the ballpark, at the north edge of Mission Bay. OpenAI now holds more than a million square feet in the neighborhood: 550 Terry Francois, the Exchange at 1800 Owens, and 1455 and 1515 Third Street, all within a ten-minute walk (The Real Deal; SF Standard). Nvidia has 45,000 square feet at Mission Rock, across the channel (SF Standard). CBRE recorded Mission Bay office asking rents near $131 a foot in Q3 2026, an all-time high and up 49.8 percent in a year, with neighborhood vacancy down from 41.2 percent at the start of 2024 to 13.2 percent at the start of this year (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