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San Francisco’s luxury market is now on the upswing after several years of choppiness, Armour said, citing the city’s new mayor and the AI boom.

The number of September home sales in San Francisco was up 36% year-over-year, according to Compass and Multiple Listing Service data. Meanwhile, there have been 106 sales of $5 million and over year-to-date through Oct. 10, versus 85 such sales in 2024 and 62 in 2023. By Sarah Tilton WSJ Oct. 15, 2025 10:30 am ET The mystery buyer behind San Francisco’s priciest home sale of the year is a limited liability company linked to Katie Schwab Paige, daughter of the famed financier Charles Schwab. Matt Paige and Katie Schwab in evening wear at the 99th San Francisco Symphony Gala. Matt Paige and Katie Schwab Paige are pictured in 2010. Carlos Avila Gonzalez/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images The Pacific Heights house, which sold for $42 million, wasn’t publicly listed for sale. It was the longtime home of Brooks Walker Jr., a well-known fixture in San Francisco business and social circles, who died last year at 96. The buyer of the house is HOS Pacific LLC, the same entity that owns another Pacific Heights home belonging to Katie Schwab Paige and her husband, Matt Paige, according to property records. Katie co-founded investment firm Short List Capital, while Matt is the owner of Paige Glass, a glass contractor, according to his LinkedIn profile. Built in 1928, the former Walker home is approximately 7,320 square feet and has sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay. It is located on the city’s Gold Coast, an area with imposing historic and modern homes. Nearby neighbors included Gordon Getty, former Apple designer Jony Ive and Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison. Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire president of Emerson Collective and the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, paid a record $71 million for a house on the same street in 2024 and is currently renovating it, according to records. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang also owns a house in the area. He’s doing work on it after paying $38 million, records show. Jensen Huang, left, Larry Ellison, center, and Jony Ive, right, all have homes in this area of Pacific Heights. From top left: Jason Alden/Bloomberg News; Lapeyre Antoine/Abaca/ZUMA PRESS; Evan Agostini/Invision/Associated Press; EagleView (aerial) The Paiges and the Walker family didn’t respond to requests for comment. Joe Lucier and Stacey Caen of Sotheby’s International Realty represented the buyers. Agent Neal Ward of Compass, who wasn’t associated with the deal, said the San Francisco market is the strongest he has seen in more than 30 years, fueled by the AI boom as well as buyers in private equity, hedge funds and venture capital. “Huge amounts of wealth are being created at this moment,” Ward said, noting that first-time buyers in their 30s are snapping up $5 million to $30 million homes. “We’re at levels we’ve never seen.”

Alarm bells are ringing about the U.S. housing market as economists warn of slumping home sales and house prices that keep rising. But those warnings may not apply to California. The state is vast and housing markets vary by region, but on average, the major metros in California aren’t experiencing the same slumps as the rest of the country. In parts of the Bay Area, home sales have even reached their highest levels since the peak of the pandemic housing boom, according to data from Compass. Typically, the U.S. housing market peaks in the spring, but this year, it was tempered by a sagging stock market and the uncertainty of looming tariffs. Patrick Carlisle, chief market analyst for Compass Bay Area, said even despite a lot of economic uncertainty, much of the Bay Area is bucking the trend of the tumbling nationwide housing market. “The South Bay is one of the strongest markets in the country. Maybe it’s the strongest because of the AI boom,” Carlisle said. He said the concentration of wealth brought by tech companies is helping the luxury sector perform particularly well, though he notes that that segment of buyers is often unaffected by mortgage rates. In the South Bay in the second quarter of the year, sales of homes priced at $5 million and above soared to their highest number since the peak of the pandemic homebuying boom, and home sale prices were up year over year in affluent markets like Atherton, Hillsborough and Menlo Park. San Francisco had a similarly successful second quarter relative to the rest of the country. Median home sales were up 8% from the first quarter of the year and up 3.5% since the same time period in 2024. Even the condo market, which had been struggling since the pandemic, was up 10% year over year according to Compass data. “The Bay Area is still one of the richest, most educated, most diverse areas in the world. Its housing market has a tendency to continue to chug along,” Carlisle said.

Top brokers from the U.S. and Canada, both currently facing an extremely challenging housing market, reflect on the formative events of the past decade. To provide a snapshot of the last decade of luxury real estate, Mansion Global spoke with some of the top real estate professionals in the most prominent markets around the world. Nearly every one of them noted that the buyer pool has grown younger, largely due sectors like tech, venture capital and even social-media stardom, as well as a wave of inheritance from baby boomers, creating mass amounts of wealth in younger generations. By Casey Farmer