After years of post-COVID hangover, San Francisco’s housing market has lost its mind again.
Real estate numbers can vary depending on who’s providing them. But two different sources concur: The first quarter of 2026 saw the city’s highest median prices ever for single-family homes ($2 million or more) and condominiums ($1.35 million), per Compass Real Estate, except for a short blip in 2022 that was goosed by that year’s eye-watering inflation.
Put another way, SF’s median single-family home price is now 51 percent more than 10 years ago, according to the California Association of Realtors. A big chunk of that change has come in the past year, with a 10.3 percent rise since April 2025.
Here’s another symptom of the madness: A local property listings company wants to add side bets to the city’s blood sport of home bidding wars.
Oakland-based TurboHome has added a “housing forecasting game” to its platform, asking visitors to guess final prices of homes listed on their service to win prizes. Of the TurboHome listings that sold in April, 88 percent went over their asking price, according to spokesperson Sara Dodrill.
TurboHome cofounder and CEO Ben Bear points at the surging AI industry for the sudden craziness. “People feel like the train is leaving the station with the IPOs that are coming up,” noting that “the market is really accelerating in places like the Sunset, the Marina, and Hayes Valley.”
Rents are catapulting higher as well. On the SF-based rental listing site Zumper, median rent is nearly $4,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. (Caveat: SF has a lot of rent-controlled apartments and tenants locked into long leases, which aren’t necessarily reflected in the latest median figures.)
Meanwhile, the city’s rent board warned in April that eviction attempts were up 43 percent over the last year, a sign that landlords expect rents to keep rising. San Francisco has some of the nation’s strongest eviction protections, so the overall rate remains relatively low.
In the past 30 years, San Franciscans have navigated two tech-driven housing booms. The most recent lasted nearly a decade and lurched to a halt with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Those boom times saw a relative spike in development — at least compared with SF’s frequent doldrums. From 2010 to 2012, SF remained in the Great Recession’s shadow and only added a net of about 2,800 new homes, a figure that mirrors the paltry output of more recent times. By the end of the decade, production ramped up. In 2018, 2019, and 2020, the city saw a total of more than 11,300 new homes open their doors.
But that pre-pandemic boom came with a big asterisk. It still wasn’t enough to satisfy even modest state housing mandates, especially for affordable housing. Even at the peak last decade, the city’s output should have been double.
Now the city faces a new cycle of mandates. For a while, the operative number was 82,000: the target SF needed to make room for (but not necessarily build) from 2023 to 2031. That number has shrunk to about 36,000 because state regulators are giving SF credit for homes that are already “in the pipeline” — at various levels of approval but not yet under construction.
There’s now a red carpet for development, relative to previous decades, and it should be faster and easier to build homes than anytime in the past 50 years. But San Francisco is almost certain to miss those state goals.
The spike in prices, added to the steady removal of red tape, should be a huge incentive to build. But there are other factors at play.
Chaos and concrete
The city’s Budget and Legislative Analyst group, which produces reports for the Board of Supervisors, reported last month that despite the housing spike, prices were still not high enough to lure developers. The cost of construction is simply too onerous.
Costs in SF rose 53.5 percent between January 2019 and December 2025, and interest rates rose more than 51 percent.
SF home prices may be up compared to the pre-COVID days, but like everything else in America, labor and materials are much pricier than they used to be. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimates that the price of concrete is up more than 49 percent since 2019, and the price of windows and doors is up nearly 67 percent.
“You’re looking at [costs of] $800,000 to $1 million per [unit],” says California Council of Affordable Housing director Jenna Abbott. “That’s very high.”
Compass chief economist Mike Simonsen suspects most builders would like “a little buffer” of even higher home prices before committing to expensive projects.
Cost of goods and fuel is also tied to Trump administration policies and decisions, which don’t seem likely to stabilize anytime soon. In a world where nobody can predict what monetary policy or markets will look like in three months, it’s hard to get investors onboard.
“Uncertainty means risk. There’s a lot of uncertainty: war, deportations, tariffs, no tariffs,” and Trump’s attempts to meddle with interest rates, says Joseph Smooke, founder of Race and Equity in All Planning (REP-SF), a coalition of neighborhood groups and housing activists.
REP-SF has also tried to curtail market-rate development. The group worked unsuccessfully to sideline the Family Zoning Plan, which loosened limits across much of the city. REP-SF is skeptical that market-rate construction can reduce housing prices, in part because of the previous boom.
During the late 2010s, while San Francisco built more housing, prices never meaningfully declined. This led density skeptics to argue that market-rate development will never create enough supply to drive down home prices. But elsewhere, supply and demand is alive and well.
Austin’s city limits
From 2015 through 2024, the Texas capital of Austin averaged 12,000 new homes annually and increased its housing stock 30 percent.
A recent Pew analysis showed rents fell 19 percent there over the past five years. Prices in new buildings were relatively high, but prices declined in older buildings.
“For Austin, the evidence that supply worked there is now pretty strong,” says Quintin Mecke, director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations (CCHO), a coalition of tenant and neighborhood groups and affordable housing developers. (CCHO also opposed the Family Zoning Plan.)
If it worked for Austin, why not San Francisco? The city’s chief economist Ted Egan cautions that one city’s success doesn’t necessarily translate to another: “Each city will have its own economic and geographical features that dictate the specific policy changes required to prevent housing price inflation.”
The City’s tax and fee incentives have not successfully reversed the decline in building activity since 2022. However, without the fee waivers, the decline likely would have been worse.
may 2026 budget and legislative analyst report
For one thing, San Francisco hasn’t built nearly as much. SF’s 2018-2020 spike produced the same number of homes as Austin saw in one year of its recent run.
San Francisco’s approval and permitting process is far more burdensome, so much so that California regulators subjected SF to a first-of-its-kind audit of housing policy and excoriated the city for having the slowest time-to-build in the state.
Spurred by state threats and by shifting political winds, SF officials are making it faster, easier, and cheaper than ever to build. The Family Zoning Plan loosened 50-year-old height and density limits across two-thirds of the city in 2025, and the city has also reduced many building fees.
The city committee that recommends affordable housing fees is calling for a dramatic two-thirds reduction to further ease costs on new buildings.
Compass’ Simonsen points out that it’s hard for SF and other California cities to forgo all housing fees, however, because of Prop 13, the landmark 1978 state law that caps local ability to raise property taxes. Without that tax base, cities like SF rely even more on fees and inclusionary housing to raise funds. Attempts to roll back Prop 13 are considered the “third rail” of California politics.
Still, new streamlining rules are having an effect, even if it’s hard to see. “The City’s tax and fee incentives have not successfully reversed the decline in building activity since 2022. […] However, without the fee waivers, the decline likely would have been worse,” according to a May BLA report.
This week’s election, and then November’s races, feature candidates on both sides of the housing line. Some want to reduce fees and timelines further; some want to reassert regulations and prevent a wave of homebuilding.
Momentum is on the side of the reformers. Even President and NIMBY-in-chief Donald Trump — who once railed about affordable housing in the suburbs and said recently he wants higher home prices for political gain — has said he’ll sign a bipartisan housing bill in the works for months. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act aims to make it cheaper and faster to build housing across the US, including new affordable homes.
Federal construction incentives could encourage a supply of new local homes, but it won’t happen soon enough to meet demand, which a new wave of tech millionaires is about to send through the roof. “Nothing in this business happens that fast,” says Sam Moss, executive director of affordable home builder Mission Housing Development.
You won’t likely be able to afford San Francisco home prices in the near future. Is it a consolation prize that there’s now a game where you can try to predict them?
