It still comes back to consumer confidence. Are you someone who's familiar with the city and feels we're more or less at the bottom? Then it might not be a bad time to buy a premium property
I come back to this one often, because it is the clearest example I have of why I talk about confidence rather than about fundamentals.
In August 2023 the top of the San Francisco market looked broken. Volume above five million dollars had roughly halved, ten million dollar homes were taking steep price cuts, and families who could have bought anything they wanted were signing thirty thousand dollar a month leases instead. A lot of the commentary at the time treated that as structural, as though San Francisco had permanently lost its claim on wealthy buyers.
What I said then was that it came down to whether you believed we were near the bottom. That was not a prediction dressed up as analysis. It described the variable that was actually moving, which was how people felt about the city's direction, and it was all anyone could say truthfully because nobody could know.
Since then the AI boom has arrived and the ultra-luxury market has not merely recovered, it has produced sales that would have been unthinkable at that moment. The buyers who concluded in 2023 that we were near the bottom were right. The ones who preferred to keep their liquidity had good reason to be cautious, but they paid for the caution.
The lesson I take from it is not that you should always buy the dip. It is that at the top of this market, the constraint is almost never affordability. It is conviction. When confidence returns to San Francisco it returns fast, and inventory at that level is so thin that there is no orderly way back in. If you are waiting for the moment when buying feels obviously safe, that moment tends to arrive after the pricing has already moved.
When this article ran I published a longer companion piece with the underlying sales figures and charts, for anyone who wants the numbers behind the quote: San Francisco Luxury Home Market in 2023.
