The Metropolitan's south tower at 355 First: eight closings this year at $1,180 a foot, two blocks from the four Anthropic corners

The Metropolitan is two towers over one podium at First and Folsom, and this report covers the 27-story south tower at 355 First Street; the 20-story north tower at 333 First has its own report. Eight condominiums closed here between January 1 and October 15, 2026, on $10,446,500 of volume. Nothing closed in the same window of 2025, and only two units closed in all of last year, so 2026 is the tower's busiest year since 2021.

The median sale is $1,573,750, which reads high for the building and is a mix effect: four of the eight closings were two-bedrooms, at a median of $1,655,000 and $1,237 a foot. The two one-bedrooms went at a median of $757,000 and $1,066 a foot. The per-foot figure across all eight is $1,180, against $1,119 for the two 2025 sales and the tower's high of $1,348 in 2020, so this year sits 12 percent under the peak.

The high sale is #S2503 at $1,750,000, a 1,480-square-foot two-bedroom that took 158 days to go into contract. #2205, 1,300 square feet, closed at $1,680,000 on May 15 after 13 days. The low is #410, a 754-square-foot one-bedroom at $725,000. The median listed sale took 23 days, and two of four went inside two weeks.

One paired resale is on record: #S710, bought in May 2021 for $775,000 and sold on July 1 for $789,000, up 1.8 percent in five years. Two transfers in the record fall under the $300,000 line and are left out; the complex carries 41 below-market-rate units across its 342 condominiums (Heller Manus).

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at The Metropolitan 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 Metropolitan since March 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 $1,348 in 2020 (8 closings). 2026 year to date stands at $1,180.

By bedroom count, 2025 against 2026

Every closing in 2026

All 8 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.

1 of these resold above the prior price, 0 below.

First and Folsom, Rincon Hill

Crescent Heights built The Metropolitan with HKS and Heller Manus, 342 condominiums in a 27-story and a 20-story tower on a three-story podium over four levels of parking; the last beam went up in January 2004 and it was the first large development on Rincon Hill after the 1989 earthquake (Crescent Heights; Heller Manus). Directly across Folsom is The Avery at 488 Folsom, the 618-foot OMA tower Related finished in 2019 with 118 condominiums above 32 floors of rentals; diagonally across is 500 Folsom, 42 stories of rentals by SOM and Essex (Wikipedia; SOM). One block south at First and Harrison is One Rincon Hill, and the 3,500-square-foot Guy Place mini-park opened off First in July 2020 (SF YIMBY; Streetsblog).

Two blocks north on First Street, the four Foundry Square buildings at First and Howard are now all Anthropic's: 500 Howard, its 230,000-square-foot headquarters, converted from a Slack sublease to a direct lease in April 2026; 505 Howard, two floors signed in September 2025; 400 Howard, about 100,000 square feet closed April 2, 2026; and 405 Howard, 70,000 square feet closed April 7 (SF Standard; Bisnow; Traded). A block further, the company leased all 466,000 square feet of 300 Howard in February (Business Wire).

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