AI wealth boom sending San Francisco home prices surging: ‘It’s ridiculous’

The ‘painted ladies’ in San Francisco on 20 August 2024. Photograph: Ethan Swope/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenThe ‘painted ladies’ in San Francisco on 20 August 2024. Photograph: Ethan Swope/Getty ImagesSan FranciscoAI wealth boom sending San Francisco home prices surging: ‘It’s ridiculous’Employees at artificial intelligence companies are coming into gargantuan sums of money amid boom in IPOs

Home prices in the San Francisco Bay Area’s already expensive market are skyrocketing as employees at leading artificial intelligence companies come into gargantuan sums of money thanks to a boom in initial public offerings.

With San Francisco’s OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as SpaceX, which operates a major facility in the Los Angeles area, eyeing debuts on the stock market, the hot housing market may not abate soon. If their initial public offering (IPO) is well-received, the companies’ multibillion-dollar valuations are poised to produce massive wealth for employees and executives holding shares, which experts say could trigger an uptick in demand for the Bay Area’s limited housing stock.

As of March 2026, the median home sale price in San Francisco was more than $2m, according to a report from real estate brokerage Compass, an 18% increase from the previous year. That same month, on average, a house spent 29 days on the market before being sold, the fastest sale rate observed since spring 2022, per the report. And experts say demand is likely to further increase, while supply remains low.

“My joke is that you have to show up to whatever the open house is. Be there a half-hour early. Have a bag of cash with you. Be willing to pay. It’s ridiculous,” said Quintin Mecke, executive director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, a coalition dedicated to affordable housing.

The recent flush of capital in the metropolitan area can probably be traced to tender offers – employees given the opportunity to sell their equity – at major AI companies. More than 600 employees at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, cashed out last fall on shares that collectively totalled $6.6bn, the Wall Street Journal reported in May. Of that group, roughly 75 people pocketed $30m each.

View image in fullscreenOpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house in Russian Hill after a suspected molotov cocktail attack in San Francisco, on 13 April. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images“If somebody’s thinking about it wisely, they’ll be thinking: ‘Well, I have this large sum of money coming my way. What is a large purchase that I may need to acquire at some point?’ And the home is on that very short list,” said Drew Wilkerson, a real estate adviser with Sotheby’s International Realty.

Wilkerson and real estate agent Spencer Hsu, who estimates about 80% of his clients work in AI, have seen competition become particularly fierce in the higher end of the market where homes sell for $5m and above.

“Just this last week, I had five calls from new buyer clients who said: ‘I know that OpenAI and Anthropic and SpaceX and these IPOs are going to happen. I want to try to get in the market before that wave of money comes,’” Wilkerson said.

Even though home prices are high, some of these potential buyers reason the market will only get more expensive post-IPO. “‘I might as well just buy it now,’” Hsu said, describing their mentality.

View image in fullscreenSan Francisco, on 30 December 2025. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty ImagesHigh-earning tech workers influencing the Bay Area’s housing market is not a new phenomenon. The dotcom era ushered in a millionaire class plucked from the C-suites of buzzy internet sites. In the ensuing so-called “gold rush” era, “shares went up like crazy … house prices soared”, said Ken Rosen, chair of the University of California, Berkeley’s Fisher center for real estate and urban economics.

A similar housing dynamic played out again in the early 2010s, when employees at Twitter (now X) and Facebook (now Meta), among other top tech firms, got substantial paydays from those companies’ IPOs.