The Crescent at California and Powell: six closings this year at $1,630 a foot, the building's record, with a median two days to contract

The Crescent is the newest building on Nob Hill and this is its best year on a per-foot basis. Six condominiums closed at 875 California Street between January 1 and October 15, 2026, against five in the same window of 2025; $13,960,000 of volume against $13,080,125. The median sale is $2,345,000 and the median price per square foot is $1,630, against $1,494 last year, a 9 percent gain, and above the $1,452 of 2020, when the developer closed 24 units, and the $1,378 of 2024, when it closed 16.

The listings moved as fast as any in this series: a median of two days to contract against 68 last year, and four of six inside two weeks. Five two-bedrooms sold at a median of $2,075,000 and $1,578 a foot; the one three-bedroom, #703, 1,828 square feet, is the high sale at $3,085,000 on June 8 after 46 days. #701, 1,547 square feet, closed at $2,650,000 on August 26 without listing. The low is #407, a 1,421-square-foot two-bedroom at $1,660,000, which took 125 days.

Three paired resales are on record. #407, bought in April 2024 for $1,600,000, sold on May 30 for $1,660,000, up 3.8 percent. #603, bought in May 2025 for $1,965,000, sold on April 29 for $2,075,000, up 5.6 percent in eleven months. #504, bought from the developer in April 2020 for $2,295,000, sold on May 29 for $1,875,000, down 18.3 percent; it is the only one of the three that was bought at the 2020 opening.

Grosvenor Americas bought the site, a surface parking lot since the 1970s, from the Stanford Court for $15 million in 2014 and built 44 condominiums to a Robert A.M. Stern design with Champalimaud interiors, 31 of them two-bedrooms, with a mirrored double-height conservatory onto a rear garden and a roof terrace (Bisnow; Miller Company). The corner had been empty for 46 years (SocketSite).

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at The Crescent 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 Crescent since April 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 $1,630 in 2026 (6 closings). 2026 year to date stands at $1,630.

By bedroom count, 2025 against 2026

Every closing in 2026

All 6 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.

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

California and Powell, where the cable cars cross

The building stands at the intersection of the California and Powell cable-car lines, facing the SFMTA's traffic kiosk; the Stanford Court is across Powell, the University Club across California and the Fairmont diagonally across both (Bisnow). The Stanford Court, 393 rooms on the site of Leland Stanford's mansion, has been owned by Woodridge Capital since December 2014 (Hotel Online). Two blocks west, the Huntington Hotel, closed since 2020, reopened in 2026 under Flynn Properties and Highgate with Ken Fulk interiors, 143 rooms and a rebuilt Nob Hill Spa; the Big 4 restaurant reopened inside it in July (SF Standard; Axios).

On December 15, 2025 a California Street cable car stopped abruptly between Leavenworth and Hyde, four blocks west, injuring 15; the car was pulled from service (Global News). No AI office of any size is within walking distance of the hill; the nearest large lease is Databricks' 150,000 square feet at One Sansome, downhill in the Financial District (Bisnow).

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