There’s a new real estate listing for a Financial District penthouse with two master suites, an office, city views, and an entertainer’s kitchen. Those offerings are fairly standard in San Francisco’s luxury condo market.
But the Stratus Vault tower is not in San Francisco. It’s not even on planet Earth. Rather, it’s located in the downtown core of the Ventara moon of the planet Galaxi, with a sky-high $3 billion price tag to match.
That sci-fi geography helps explain some of the Blade Runner-esque home’s more fantastical features, such as kinetic shields to deflect daily micro meteor showers, easy access to space ports, and a private shuttle pad (a rare find on Ventara).
The listing notes also reveal some darker commentary about the conditions on Galaxi whitewashed with relentlessly upbeat Realtor-speak, like the 240th-floor unit’s “spacious slave quarters” and “aerosol mood suppressants,” as well as some “peacefully contained” rebellions on the lower levels of the tower.
This interactive, intergalactic, slightly sinister AI real estate agent is actually an art exhibit at the Madrone Art Bar on Divisadero. It’s the brainchild of Tucker Johnson and Molly Fox, a married couple who are still light-years away from buying a home in San Francisco. Their hope for a place of their own — a major topic among their fellow thirtysomethings — started to seem like an out-of-reach fantasy, which led to the surrealistic take on real estate they’re depicting at the art bar.
The installation is called “IGGY,” which stands for Inter Galactic Gentrifying Yuppie. As befits such a sci-fi world, they’ve woven an elaborate backstory into the character of their AI real estate broker to the stars. Rather than setting IGGY in the future, it is very much a product of the present. The story goes that it was designed in 2024 to be the best real estate agent ever, so, naturally, by 2025 it had created interstellar travel and began colonizing livable planets in the far reaches of the galaxy in an attempt to offer more ski lodges and dude ranches to the elite few who can afford them.
“What resonated with me was the ridiculousness of it, yet it was totally plausible,” said Madrone owner Michael Krouse, who selected the couple’s work to reside in his bar’s window through February. “It directly confronts the lack of affordability within the real estate world, something that has always bothered me.”
The bismuth salt hot tubs with ”epic lunar views” in IGGY’s $5 billion Luna Chalet. | Source: Courtesy Tucker Johnson and Molly Fox
Johnson and Fox say IGGY is a commentary on not just the out-of-this-world real estate prices in the city but the potential unintended consequences of AI. They also threw a little shade on billionaires who’ve gravitated toward space travel as a way to escape environmental destruction rather than repair the harm caused here by an insatiable demand for energy and minerals to power our devices.
“I like this planet a lot. I’m very happy to live here,” Johnson said. “There’s just this modern tech world we live in with Elon Musk saying we’ve got to colonize Mars and leave the planet, and it’s like, well, what if we just didn’t destroy it in the first place?”
The couple, who have lived in New York and Los Angeles, moved to San Francisco two years ago, when Fox got a job in product development for a local tech company. Johnson creates branded video content for a media company based in L.A. Both report that they regularly use AI at work.
“I think that it’s just a fundamental part of our jobs and lives now, but at the same time, I do worry about the dangers to come,” Fox said.
The man cave at a $9.5 billion offering at Roxxor Ranch on planet Mandar. | Source: Courtesy Tucker Johnson and Molly Fox
The Harper Cottage, an “affordable” starter home on the planet Rekol-8. | Source: Courtesy Tucker Johnson and Molly Fox
They also used AI to create the IGGY display on view at Madrone and an interactive website (opens in new tab) where hundreds of users so far have made their own intergalactic listings. Local AI company Midjourney is responsible for the real estate renderings, and ChatGPT wrote the initial descriptions based on prompts input by the couple, who punched them up with their human sense of humor. Fox used AI to vibe-code the website, with the bot inventing bios for IGGY’s fake founders and testimonies from “clients,” like a space tech VC who said that thanks to IGGY, “finding my lunar beachside home was a breeze!”
Coding the website actually took less effort than creating the Madrone display. The couple took great pains to make it look as close as possible to the window of a real estate office, with listing pictures and descriptions ensconced between backlit pieces of plexiglass hanging in a grid.
The Luna Chalet on snow-swept Craxtor, where the nitrogen levels are safe for outdoor activity just 4.2% of the time. | Source: Courtesy Tucker Johnson and Molly Fox
“The ideal situation would be somebody with a lot of money checking them out and being like, ‘Oh, only a billion dollars? Oh, wait, it’s on a different planet,’” said Johnson.
Without the real estate community uploading millions of listings to the internet, IGGY wouldn’t be nearly as convincing. The AI was scarily good at coopting the language of both real estate agents and sci-fi writers and mashing them together.
“We might have tweaked a few things, but part of the fun was just riding with whatever was spit out,” Johnson said.