The Four Seasons tops the list of the city’s most-expensive condo buildings, according to a new survey from Paragon Real Estate. Condos in the Market Street high-rise sold for a median price of $1,760 a square foot, or about $3.2 million, in the calendar year ending May 30, 2014. 999 Green in Russian Hill was next down on the list, with a median price of $1,653 per square foot.
999 Green aside, most of the buildings with median prices over $1 million were in SoMa, South Beach and Yerba Buena. That area of the city also saw 834 condo, loft, co-op and TIC sales in the last year, far more than any other neighborhood. The survey only looked at buildings with at least four MLS sales in the previous 12 months, so smaller, older buildings were typically excluded from the results.
Within larger building sales, units in new condo projects sold for significantly more per square foot than those built before the 2007 housing crash. For example, in Portrero Hill the average price per square foot of a pre-2007 condo was $722, versus $1,135 at the newly constructed 415 De Haro.
As Paragon summarizes in its report: “Much of the city’s new construction is occurring on parcels that were previously commercial-industrial, often on busy urban streets and/or in relatively neglected sections of the city, places that not so long ago might have been considered subprime locations for residential development. That has flipped 180 degrees: Wherever they are, most of these new projects are selling for prices rarely, if ever, seen before in their respective neighborhoods and bringing in new populations of typically young, affluent buyers. For good or ill, or both, depending on how you feel about this phenomenon, these developments are altering the look, the cultures, demographics, commercial districts and home values of the neighborhoods they’re sprouting up in.”