When Nima Gabbay decided to sell his three-bedroom, two-bath San Francisco home for $2.995 million last month, his listing described the residence\u2019s soaring 10-foot ceilings, kitchen wrapped in Calacatta marble, remote-control skylights and oversize two-car garage.<\/p>\n
The 51-year-old real estate investor and developer also added an unusual clause: He would accept shares of OpenAI<\/a> or Anthropic<\/a> as payment for the home.<\/p>\n Two OpenAI employees soon came forward offering some of their shares for the property, Mr. Gabbay said. One bid more than $1 million above the asking price, but appeared to inflate the value of his OpenAI stock. The other backed off when OpenAI filed to go public<\/a> last month, deciding to hang on to the stock.<\/p>\n Mr. Gabbay ultimately went with a third buyer who works in tech, and the sale is set to close this week. He was not at liberty to disclose the sale terms or the buyer\u2019s identity because he had signed a nondisclosure agreement, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a bit of a gold rush situation right now in San Francisco,\u201d Mr. Gabbay said. Selling the home was \u201can avenue for me to potentially pick up some of this stock and be a part of the excitement of the companies going public.\u201d<\/p>\n Even before OpenAI and Anthropic hold initial public offerings, the artificial intelligence companies \u2014 which are based in San Francisco and leading the A.I. boom \u2014 are distorting the city\u2019s housing market. Sellers are asking for pre-I.P.O. stock as payment for homes, property prices are surging as buyers bet that whatever they overpay today will look cheap tomorrow, and landlords are pushing out tenants to sell into the hotter market.<\/p>\n The maneuvering is aimed at getting ahead of the wave of wealth when OpenAI and Anthropic, each valued at nearly $1 trillion, go public. Their I.P.O.s, plus the recent public offering of Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX<\/a>, could create more than 16,000 millionaires and more than 20 billionaires<\/a>, according to Sacra, a private market research company.<\/p>\n Already, San Francisco\u2019s sales of homes above $10 million have doubled over the past six months compared with a year earlier, said Joel Goodrich, an agent with Coldwell Banker Global Luxury.<\/p>\n Forty-four homes closed at prices at least $1 million more than their asking price last month, said Mike Simonsen, the chief economist for Compass Real Estate. And there have been 144 such sales so far this year, up from eight in the first half of 2025. Fewer than 600 homes \u2014 including single-family houses and condos \u2014 are on the market today, about 40 percent below San Francisco\u2019s average of the past decade, according to Compass.<\/p>\n The market is so frenzied that a six-bedroom, seven-bathroom 5,725-square-foot home in the Cow Hollow neighborhood with views of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz sold for $15 million in May, nearly double the list price of $7.9 million, according to John Caruso of Sotheby\u2019s International Realty.<\/p>\n Even in a city that lived through the late-1990s dot-com boom<\/a> and major public offerings by companies like Google (in 2004)<\/a>, Facebook (2012)<\/a> and Uber (2019)<\/a>, property agents and wealth managers said they had never seen anything quite like this.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a hysteria that\u2019s out there right now,\u201d said Pete Rodway, a Compass agent who works mostly in the luxury market.<\/p>\n One of his clients, an OpenAI employee, was scrambling to buy a $5 million home now to beat \u201ca thousand other people that are going to have a budget of $30 million,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Garret Spiecker, who works at Citizens Private Bank and describes himself as a \u201cfinancial therapist\u201d for sudden wealth, said he had advised dozens of OpenAI and Anthropic employees on how to navigate the housing market. He has suggested they buy properties through trusts to protect their privacy, especially on homes above $5 million.<\/p>\n \u201cIn this cycle, which differs from some of the others, a lot of these individuals are very young and quite wealthy very fast,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Anthropic and OpenAI, which have not set dates for their I.P.O.s, declined to comment. (The New York Times has sued<\/a> OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied the claims.)<\/p>\n Techies who do not work at OpenAI or Anthropic have accelerated their plans to buy homes. Sam Rosenstein, 31, a software engineer at the software company Databricks, and his partner, Michelle Huang, 31, who works in tech sales, jumped into the market this spring partly because they wanted to close on a deal before the flood of A.I. wealth, Ms. Huang said.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was just a general acceptance that that time will eventually come,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Their urgency spiked when Mr. Rosenstein\u2019s landlord decided to sell his rental property to cash in on the rising market. But the competition for a home was so fierce that one house the couple bid $600,000 over asking for in April ended up selling for roughly $900,000 more than its asking price.<\/p>\n In May, Mr. Rosenstein and Ms. Huang landed a four-bedroom, two-bathroom in the Hayes Valley neighborhood for $2.185 million, bidding $385,000 above asking.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we put in the offer for the house, the seller came back and said we could pay the offer that we put in, or we could pay less money but provide 60 hours of A.I. consulting\u201d on a personal project, Mr. Rosenstein said. \u201cThat\u2019s totally the weirdest thing that has happened.\u201d They declined the $10,000 discount.<\/p>\n Like Mr. Gabbay, other home sellers are unabashedly angling for shares of OpenAI and Anthropic.<\/p>\n In April, Storm Duncan, 56, the founder of the tech-focused investment bank Ignatious, quietly marketed his 4,372-square-foot four-bedroom, five-bath compound<\/a> in nearby Mill Valley, Calif. \u2014 featuring an infinity pool and views of the San Francisco skyline \u2014 on a LinkedIn page he created just for his house, which he valued at approximately $8 million. He direct-messaged Anthropic employees and investors, hoping to trade the home for stock.<\/p>\n The listing went viral after someone from Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm that has invested in Anthropic and OpenAI, leaked the LinkedIn post, Mr. Duncan said. The California Post published an article<\/a> about the property soon after.<\/p>\n Mr. Duncan took the listing down, though he said he would still do the deal if the right opportunity arose. Anthropic is \u201cnarrowly focused on building a great product,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n