A Million Over Asking

Mike Simonsen, Compass's chief economist, published his July San Francisco report this week, with data through June. He leads with a striking line: in June, 44 homes in the city sold for at least a million dollars over asking, which he reads as an AI-driven wealth boom pulling the market to record heights. It is an excellent report, and the number is real. His is the national, top-down view; what I can add from here is the block-by-block companion, so I pulled the same closings from the MLS to see how they look up close. Here is the local read, offered alongside his.

What is inside the number

The homes behind that headline are a specific set: every San Francisco closing in June, Districts 1 through 10, that beat its list price by a million dollars or more. There are about forty-five of them, and their composition tells you far more than the count does.

For what it is worth, running the same June closings independently lands me at forty-five, one more than the figure making the rounds. Nothing turns on it. The difference is a single tenancy-in-common that sits just outside a strict house-and-condo count, a fair reminder that a tally like this is only as sharp as where you draw the property-type line.

The homes themselves, with photos and full detail, are on Compass. See all 45 on Compass if you want to walk the list.

It is a house story, in three neighborhoods

Thirty-six of them were single-family houses. Only two were condos, and the other seven were house-type properties too, mostly small two- and three-unit buildings and a townhouse. So this is not the market most buyers are shopping. It is the detached-house top end. And it is not spread across the city. Three districts hold 36 of the 45: the central spine of Noe Valley, Eureka Valley, Cole Valley and the Haight had 14; the Richmond, Sea Cliff and Lake Street had 13; and Pacific Heights, the Marina and Cow Hollow had 9. Everywhere else in the city, combined, produced nine. I will note without overselling it that my own District 1 was the second-busiest on this list. It is happening on my streets, and it is still a narrow slice of them.

A closer look at how these homes were priced

Here is what the block-level view adds. Selling a million over asking measures the gap between the list price and the sale price, and that gap is set by two very different things: how badly buyers want the home, and how the agent chose to price it. In this group, pricing did a lot of the work. Those 45 homes cleared a median of 144% of their list price, taken home by home. The median list was $3.5M and the median sale was $4.95M, and they did it in a median of nine days. That is the typical home in this group clearing 44% over its list, and a home does not organically sell that far over its own asking. Those list prices were set deliberately low to start a bidding war, which is a common and legal strategy in this city, especially for houses in exactly these neighborhoods. The demand behind the final number is real. The size of the "over asking" figure is, in meaningful part, a listing tactic. Naming that plainly is exactly what a block-by-block read is for.

At the extreme, the tactic is even starker, though it comes with a caveat. The single widest overbid of the year was a home across from Ocean Beach, listed at $1.495M and sold for $3.5M in cash, 234% of list. But the very top of the overbid list is not all bidding wars. Two of the three homes that cleared 200% of list this spring were estate and trust sales, listed low and sold as-is, which inflates the gap without a frenzy behind it. Even the extreme tail is telling you the same thing: the number is about how a home was priced.

The same homes, priced a year ago

This is the part worth sitting on, because it is the heart of it. Underpricing houses is not new in San Francisco. Even in June 2019, before the pandemic, houses here sold at about 115% of list. The tactic is old. What changed is how hard it is being pushed. A year ago, in June 2025, the typical San Francisco house sold at 111% of list. This June it was 124%, the widest gap in my data going back to 2016, and a 13-point jump in a single year. Now look at what moved and what did not: median list prices rose about 7% year over year, while median sale prices rose about 24%. The list prices stayed anchored near last year while the market ran, and the space between them is exactly what gets reported as "over asking."

You can see it best one house at a time, and I pulled the sale history to check. In Corona Heights, a home that last sold for about $2.25M in 2018 came to market this June listed at $2.098M, below its own eight-year-old price, and sold for $3.475M: 166% of list in fourteen days. In my own Central Richmond, one that last sold for about $2.23M in 2017 was listed at $2.95M and closed at $4.1M in ten days. In both cases the list price acknowledged a fraction of the market's move; the sale price acknowledged all of it. The "over asking" number is the distance between an honest price and a strategic one.

Put the appreciation in perspective, because two very different things hide inside these sales. The long-term owners, the ones who held seven, eight, nine years, compounded at about 7% a year: the Central Richmond home up 84% in total lands right there. Strong and steady, and unremarkable once you annualize it. The eye-popping numbers all came from the other group: homes bought in 2024 or 2025 and resold this year, up 50%, 130%, even 300% annualized. That is not the market handing out money. That is renovation and rebuilds, value someone added and resold. Citywide, the median house has compounded near 5% a year over the decade and closer to 3% since 2019. And here is the tell: every one of these homes, the slow gainer and the seven-month flip alike, still sold at least 20% over asking. The overbid is not a measure of how much a home appreciated. It is a pricing choice laid on top of whatever the home actually did.

None of this means the demand is fake. Price these sales by last year's convention and the premium roughly halves, but it does not vanish, because buyers are genuinely competing. At the very top the tactic matters least: a Pacific Heights home listed at $6M sold at $7.6M, 127% of list, priced close to its tier and simply drawing a deeper pocket. Two things are true at once: homes are worth more, and the over-asking figure is inflated by list prices that stopped keeping up.

Two different sales behind one number

Those 45 homes are not even one kind of sale. Split them by where they sit and two stories appear. In the three blue-chip districts, the Richmond, the central spine from Noe to Cole, and Pacific Heights, these are trophy houses, mostly long held, trading at a median near $5M. Real owners, real appreciation, priced low and bid up. The other nine, out in the Mission, the Sunset, Forest Hill and Hayes Valley, are a different trade. They sell a full tier lower, near $3.45M, yet they were listed even more aggressively, and nearly half were recent flips or rebuilds, bought, renovated and resold inside a year or two. Same million-over-asking headline, two engines underneath: concentrated wealth buying scarce blue-chip houses on one side, the renovation trade working the middle of the market on the other. With only nine homes on that second side, treat it as a direction rather than a hard count, but the split is real, and it is worth knowing which of the two your own block belongs to.

The cash fingerprint is the real evidence

If you want proof that concentrated wealth is driving this top end, do not point at the overbid, point at the financing. That 45-home group was 54% all cash. Across all June house sales the cash share was 29%, and across all sales it was 33%. So the homes at the very top of the overbid list were bought with cash at nearly twice the rate of the market around them. That is the measurable signature of wealth: buyers who do not need a loan, do not flinch at 6.5% mortgage rates, and can remove financing to win. It is a small, specific, cash-heavy cohort, and it is pulling the citywide house median up with it.

By the numbers

Metric	Reading	Context
Homes that sold $1M+ over list, June (D1-10)	about 45	The full set behind the June headline, Districts 1-10
Single-family share of that group	80% (36 of 45)	Only 2 were condos
Where they were	36 of 45 in three districts	D5 Noe/Eureka/Cole 14, D1 Richmond/Sea Cliff 13, D7 Pac Hts/Marina 9
Cash share of the group	54%	Versus 29% of all June house sales, and 33% of all sales
Median sale-to-list, the group	144%	List $3.5M, close $4.95M, a median of 9 days on market
Widest overbid this spring	234% of list	An Ocean Beach home listed $1.495M, sold $3.5M cash; the extreme tail skews to estate sales
Typical house sale-to-list, June	124% of list	Up from 111% a year ago and 115% pre-pandemic 2019; widest since 2016
List vs sale price growth, year over year	list +7%, sale +24%	List prices stopped keeping pace with the market
Same-home appreciation, long-held trophy homes	about 7% a year	Median repeat sale held 3+ years; a 50 to 84% total over 7 to 9 years
Citywide house appreciation	about 5% a year over a decade	Closer to 3% a year since 2019; annualized, this is not a mania
Homes $1M+ over list, this spring	133	March to June; 6 last spring, prior record 33 in 2022
Cash share, this spring vs the 2021 boom	34% vs 18%	Highest in a decade; 2021 ran on sub-3% mortgages, this one on cash
Luxury volume this spring, $5M+ houses	86, an all-time high	Nearly double last spring; $3M+ condos also a record at 74
Genuine premium vs manufactured, the group	about a third genuine, two-thirds underpriced	Genuine median close $6.85M; underpriced median 151% of list, four listed below prior sale
If listed at the normal SF overbid	about 7 of 133 survive	At 110 to 115% of list, only the genuine $9M+ homes still clear $1M over
Where the group was listed, by list price	half under $3M, a fifth under $2M	Buyers shop the list; the $1.5M to $3M band is the most exposed
Citywide houses, last 30 days	$2.11M, 125% of list	Up about 24% in a year, 90% sold over asking
Citywide condos, last 30 days	$1.23M, 101% of list	Up about 5% in a year, a steadier lane
Tenancy-in-common lane, trailing year	$1.10M, flat	Essentially unchanged, the genuinely soft segment

How this spring compares

Step back ten years and this spring is not a hot version of a normal market, it is a different market. The 44 sales in June that started all of this are one month of a spring that produced 133 homes selling a million or more over list, March through June. Last spring there were six. The frenzied spring of 2022, the prior record, had 33. In most of the last ten springs the number sat in the single digits. This is not the top of a trend, it is a break from it. And the median spring house, at $2.13M, is an all-time high, up about 20% in a single year.

The engine also changed. The last time spring ran this hot was 2021, but that boom was built on cheap money: only 18% of buyers paid cash, the lowest in the decade, because sub-3% mortgages did the lifting. This spring, with rates near 6.5%, 34% paid cash, the highest in the decade. Same heat, opposite engine. 2021 was leverage. This one is wealth, buyers who do not need the rate to cooperate.

And it is not only the overbids. The very top of the market hit record volume this spring too: 86 houses sold for $5M or more and 74 condos for $3M or more, both all-time highs, and both roughly double last spring. So even as the broad condo market stays calm, the very top of it is trading at a record pace. Three signals at once, the overbids, the luxury houses, the luxury condos, and the common thread across all of them is cash.

How much of it was real

Not all of these were bidding wars. Split the homes by what produced the million-dollar gap and about a third were genuine: expensive homes, a median close near $6.85M, listed near value and bid up a normal 15 to 30 percent, real competition. The other two-thirds were underpriced: mid-priced homes near $3.66M run up 30 to 90 percent, a median 151 percent of list, and four were listed below their own prior sale. The higher the price, the more real the overbid; the more mid-market, the more it was the listing tactic.

Here is the sharpest way to see it. Had these same homes been listed at San Francisco's normal overbid, the 110 to 115 percent of list the city has run even in ordinary years, only about seven of the 133 would still have cleared a million over asking, the genuine homes above $9M where a million dollars is a small percentage. Everything else is a million over only because it was listed low. It is a real market, running hot, dressed up by how the homes were priced.

And read the price points honestly, because this is where it matters for buyers. These homes sold at a median of $4.5M, so it is easy to file the whole thing under luxury. But buyers shop the list, not the sale, and the lists ran low: half of these homes were listed under $3M and a fifth under $2M. A buyer touring a two-million-dollar house in these neighborhoods is not safely below the fray, they are the most exposed to a manufactured war, because that is exactly the band that gets underpriced. The honest counsel is not fear, it is precision: do not trust the list, underwrite to what the block is really worth.

The AI read, and what the numbers show up close

Simonsen ties this to AI wealth, and the timing and the money both fit. What my closings add is the texture underneath that: the wealth shows up unmistakably in the cash share. Where exactly it originates my records cannot say, and it is probably mixed, equity-rich AI and tech buyers alongside longtime owners trading up, out-of-area money, and families pooling resources. So take both together, his read on the source and the block-level detail on how it is landing. The wealth is real and concentrated, and it is buying scarce houses in a handful of neighborhoods.

The other lane, for almost everyone else

Step outside those 45 homes and the market is far calmer than the citywide number suggests. Over the last 30 days, citywide houses ran a $2.11M median at 125% of list, genuinely hot. But condos ran a $1.23M median at 101% of list, up about 5% in a year, a steady climb rather than a frenzy. Tenancy-in-common homes, the city's value lane, were essentially flat over the trailing year at about $1.1M. Most people buying in San Francisco right now are not in a bidding war a million over asking. They are in a normal, competitive-but- sane market. The frenzy is loud precisely because it is rare.

Scoreboard update

The AI wealth story, read honestly, is a west-side and central house story. The condo towers closest to the actual AI offices, in SoMa, Mission Bay and South Beach, remain the soft end of the market. South Beach condos ran about 10% below last year in the July report even as their sales volume climbed. Activity is returning to that corridor, but pricing has not, which keeps it the clearest opening for a patient buyer. The headline and the opportunity are in two different parts of the city.

AI Corridor Scoreboard

One reading per issue on the city's softest segment, the condos near the new AI offices, so you can watch the turn as it happens.

Issue	Date	Reading	Call
#01	Jun 7, 2026	Soft. Only 37 to 43% of SoMa, Mission Bay, and downtown condos sold over asking.	Clearest buyer opportunity in the city.
#02	Jun 10, 2026	Turning at the edges. Citywide condos hit 101.4% of list in May; inventory fell to 584 from 905. The corridor towers remain the soft end.	Window narrowing, not closed.
#03	Jun 13, 2026	Still the bottom of the overbid table. Corridor sale-to-list at about 98 to 99% versus 103.6% citywide, trailing year.	Opportunity intact for negotiators.
#04	Jun 17, 2026	Still the soft floor while houses raced ahead. Corridor near 98 to 99% of list versus 103.8% citywide and about 123% for single-family in the last 30 days.	Buyer opportunity holds; the gap to houses only widened.
#05	Jun 21, 2026	Cash, not heat. Corridor condos carry heavier cash than the citywide condo average, about 42% versus 37%, yet still sell near 98.7% of list with only about 20% over asking versus 45% citywide. Cash concentrates here; competition does not.	Negotiating room for financed buyers.
#06	Jun 25, 2026	Still the calm corner while the house middle runs hot. District 9 condos, SoMa, Mission Bay, and South Beach, sold right at list, about 100%, with only 35% over asking on 300 sales, against the $1.5M to $3M house band at 122 to 125% of list.	Buyer opportunity holds where the bidding wars are not.
#08	Jul 5, 2026	Still the soft floor even as the top books records. District 9 condos, SoMa, Mission Bay, and South Beach, sold near 100% of list with heavy cash and light competition, while $5M+ houses set a decade volume record at about 112% of list on roughly 64% cash. Cash without a crowd here.	Buyer opportunity intact where the crowds are not.
#09	Jul 10, 2026	Still the soft floor at the halfway mark. District 9 condos, SoMa, Mission Bay, and South Beach, sold near 100% of list with only about 36% over asking on roughly 290 sales this year, while citywide houses ran near 121% of list. The widest lane in the city stays open.	Clearest buyer opportunity holds into the second half.
#10 (this issue)	Jul 14, 2026	Still soft while the headline is elsewhere. June's million-over-asking story is a west-side and central house market, not the AI-corridor towers. District 9 condos, SoMa, Mission Bay and South Beach, ran about 10% below last year even as volume climbed. Activity returns to the corridor; pricing has not.	Still the clearest buyer opening in the city.

What this means for you

Buying a trophy house in District 1, 5 or 7? Assume the list price is a floor, not a target, and bring a real walk-away number so a manufactured bidding war does not become your emotion managing your money. Buying almost anywhere or anything else? Do not let a citywide number talk you into overpaying for a market that is not actually that hot; in condos you still have room and time. Selling a house in those top neighborhoods? The price-it-low-and-let-it-run playbook is working, but it is a tactic with real tradeoffs, not magic, and it only works with the right home, the right prep and the honest expectation that some buyers walk when they sense the game. Selling anything else? Price to your block's real number and let the market meet it. If you want to know which of these lanes your specific home or search sits in, that is exactly the conversation I am here for.

This issue builds on the July 2026 report from Mike Simonsen with a block-by-block local read from the MLS. Download the full report (PDF) for every chart and neighborhood table.

Methodology and sources

Reproduction and decomposition figures are from POTM Command governed MLS data (closed sales, San Francisco Districts 1 through 10, June 2026), pulled July 11, 2026. The $1M+ over-list group is the 45 closings whose sale price exceeded list price by at least $1,000,000. Citywide house and condo readings are trailing-30-day medians through July 11, 2026. The third-party frame is Mike Simonsen's July 2026 San Francisco report for Compass (Compass via MLS data, through June 2026). Prices are medians unless noted, and sale-to-list percentages are medians taken home by home, so they need not equal one median price divided by another. Financed and cash shares are of sales with reported financing. General information, not a forecast or individual advice. Historical sale-to-list comparisons use closed sales 2016 through June 2026; individual home examples come from matched prior sales in that record and are identified by neighborhood only, never by address. Same-home appreciation is a compound annual growth rate between a home's prior recorded sale and its 2026 sale; holds under three years are excluded from appreciation figures because renovations and rebuilds inflate them. Citywide appreciation is the compound annual growth of the June median single-family sale price. District and neighborhood breakdowns run on small monthly samples, often nine to fourteen sales, and should be read as directional, not firm.