[A row of houses in a neighborhood of San Francisco. Photo Credit: Pixabay]

Last month, 44 properties in San Francisco sold for at least 1 million more than their asking price. 

This year, there have been 144 such sales, up from eight in the first half of 2025.

Property prices are rising as purchasers bet that whatever they overpay today will seem cheap tomorrow, sellers are requesting pre-IPO stock as payment for residences, and landlords are pressuring tenants to sell into the hotter market. 

When OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which are estimated to be valued $1 trillion, go public, the maneuvering is intended to get ahead of the wealth surge. 

Their initial public offerings and the latest public offering of Elon Musk's SpaceX could make over 16,000 millionaires and over 20 billionaires.

compared to a year ago, San Francisco's sales of properties valued at more than $10 million have already doubled in the last six months. 

Currently, there are fewer than 600 properties available, including single-family homes and condominiums, roughly 40% less than San Francisco's average over the last ten years.

A six-bedroom, seven-bathroom, 5,725-square-foot house in the Cow Hollow neighborhood with views of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge sold for $15 million in May, nearly double the advertised price of $7.9 million, demonstrating the market’s volatility. 

Property brokers and wealth managers said they had never seen anything like this, even in a city that had the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and huge public offerings by businesses like Google (2004), Facebook (2012), and Uber (2019).

According to real estate agents, there is a current panic as, for instance, an OpenAI employee was rushing to purchase a $5 million house in order to outbid a thousand others who would have a $30 million budget. 

Numerous workers of Anthropic and OpenAI have been guided through the housing market. 

To maintain their privacy, some have been advised to purchase properties through trusts, particularly those valued at more than $5 million.

Many of these newcomers are very young and have become wealthy quite quickly in this cycle, which differs from some of the others. 

OpenAI and Anthropic, who have not yet announced their I.P.O. dates, declined to comment. 

A hypothetical calculation by Redfin, assuming every current and former OpenAI and Anthropic employee pooled their after-tax equity to buy homes, found that this sum could theoretically purchase roughly twenty-nine percent of all residences in San Francisco, where both companies are headquartered.

this figure represents 29% of all residences in the metro area, not simply those that are for sale. 

OpenAI aims to be valued at approximately $1 trillion, and employee equity makes up about 26% of the company, or about $260 billion at a $1 trillion valuation. 

The company has already distributed $80 billion in vested equity to employees and has set aside an additional $50 billion for an employee stock grant pool. 

The employee equity ownership held by Anthropic has not been made public.