The San Francisco Bay Area's already stratospheric housing market is hitting new extremes as employees at artificial intelligence giants cash in on company share sales, with some workers netting tens of millions of dollars at a single stroke.
The spike coincides with a wave of expected initial public offerings from powerhouse firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, both headquartered in downtown San Francisco, plus SpaceX from the Los Angeles area. Real estate professionals say the combination of massive newfound wealth and pent-up demand is creating a buying frenzy that could intensify dramatically once these companies go public.
Median home prices in San Francisco reached $2 million in March 2026, up 18% from a year earlier. Homes are moving faster than they have since spring 2022, sitting on the market for just 29 days on average before sale, according to brokerage Compass.
Last fall alone, more than 600 OpenAI employees cashed out on equity worth $6.6 billion collectively. About 75 of those workers each received roughly $30 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Real estate agents report clients openly referencing the upcoming IPOs as motivation to buy now rather than wait. One agent said he fielded five calls in a single week from prospective buyers explicitly citing plans by OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX to enter the market as urgency to close deals before share-driven wealth floods in.
"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," said Drew Wilkerson, a real estate adviser with Sotheby's International Realty. Competition in the luxury segment above $5 million has grown particularly intense.
Quintin Mecke, executive director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, captured the market's absurdity bluntly: "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."
The dynamic echoes patterns from tech booms past. The dotcom era and the 2010s social media IPO wave both sent Bay Area home prices soaring as newly wealthy tech workers bid aggressively for property. But experts see key differences this time.
SpaceX's expected IPO values the company at $1.77 trillion, with a target share price of $135. That would make it the largest IPO in history, far exceeding Twitter's $26 per share debut and Facebook's $38 entry point in the 2010s. Additionally, OpenAI and Anthropic's downtown San Francisco headquarters mean employees are more likely to live and buy near their offices rather than commuting from farther away as earlier tech workers often did.
Housing inventory, however, remains a chronic constraint. San Francisco has struggled for years with zoning restrictions and slow permitting that limit new construction. Mayor Daniel Lurie recently signed a rezoning law aimed at enabling taller, multi-unit buildings, but the city still lags peer cities in processing housing approvals.
The pressure extends beyond luxury listings to working-class neighborhoods and rental markets. One-bedroom apartments in San Francisco now average $4,000 per month, an all-time high. Two-bedroom units rent for $5,500. Neighborhoods including SoMa, Mission Bay, Pacific Heights, and Hayes Valley have seen the sharpest rent increases, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Not everyone is diving into the market. Some current homeowners consider selling but hesitate, knowing they too would face those inflated prices. Others worry that the AI boom, like all tech bubbles, will eventually deflate, leaving late buyers underwater.
"Booms are always followed by busts. Always," said Ken Rosen, chair of UC Berkeley's Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics. After the dotcom crash, he noted, "house prices corrected downward for the next four years, five years."
Author James Rodriguez: "The scene is a replay of tech excess, but with valuations so stratospheric that the comedown, when it arrives, could hit harder."
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