I've been investing in San Francisco real estate since 2003. I've bought, sold, remodeled, and held property through the 2008 collapse, the 2012 to 2015 melt-up, the pandemic doom loop, and now whatever historians will eventually name this. In all that time, I've never seen a wealth-creation setup quite like the one staring thousands of AI employees in the face right now.
Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1, 2026, potentially beating OpenAI to Wall Street as soon as the fall of 2026. OpenAI is targeting the same window. Databricks is openly signaling a 2027 listing. These are projected to be among the largest IPOs in history, and a meaningful chunk of the newly minted wealth is going to land right here in San Francisco.
If you work at one of these companies, you already know the awkward math. As one local realtor put it bluntly, you might be worth $100 or $100 million on paper while earning $300,000 a year, which means today you can't actually buy a house befitting your net worth. That changes the moment your lockup expires and your shares turn liquid.
So where should you buy? Let me save you a year of weekend open houses and a lot of expensive mistakes.
The short answer: go west. Forest Hill, St. Francis Wood, Golden Gate Heights, and West Portal. And if you can work from home two or three days a week, the case for the west side goes from strong to overwhelming.
Let me explain why.
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First, Know Where Your Office Actually Is
Your commute tolerance should set your buying radius. So before you fall in love with a house, understand where your company sits and when your money actually arrives.
OpenAI
OpenAI is headquartered at 1455 3rd Street in Mission Bay, with a footprint exceeding a million square feet across the city. It's targeting an IPO potentially as early as this fall at a valuation reported around $852 billion. More than 600 current and former OpenAI employees have already sold roughly $6.6 billion in stock on the secondary market, so the liquidity wave has been building for a while. The IPO turns the faucet to full.
Mission Bay is the most southeasterly of the big AI campuses, which actually makes the west side a cleaner drive than you'd guess. Straight down to the 280, and you're home.
Anthropic
Anthropic is the one to watch on timing. It filed confidentially on June 1 and could be first to the public markets, at a valuation near $965 billion. Its offices cluster around 500 Howard Street in SoMa, along the stretch landlords now call “AI Alley,” where the company has leased close to a million square feet.
For an Anthropic employee, SoMa to West Portal is one straight shot on the Muni Metro. If your shares are about to become real money this fall, this is the article to bookmark.
Databricks
Databricks is the quiet giant of this group. It's headquartered in San Francisco, crossed a $5.4 billion revenue run rate growing 65% year over year, and carries a $134 billion valuation. CEO Ali Ghodsi has said the company is “ready to IPO” and hasn't ruled out a 2026 listing, with most analysts pointing to the second half of the year.
Here's why Databricks employees specifically should read the rest of this article closely. The workforce skews a touch older and more established than the frontier labs, which means more families, more people who want a yard and a third bedroom, and more people for whom the west side was practically designed. If that's you, keep reading.
And everyone else
OpenAI, Anthropic, and Databricks are the headline acts, but they aren't alone. Scale AI, Perplexity, Glean, Together AI, Harvey AI, and the rest of the ecosystem all employ thousands of well-compensated people who will eventually convert paper wealth into a place to live. If you're at one of those, the logic below still applies. The west side is the play.
Why The West Side, And Why Now
Here's the mistake most newly liquid tech employees make. They chase Pacific Heights or Noe Valley because those are the names they've heard, then overpay for a narrow Victorian sitting 15 feet from the sidewalk with no driveway. Homes are just one inch apart and it's a crowded feeling.
The smart money goes west.
I wrote a detailed breakdown of the best neighborhoods to buy on the west side of San Francisco, and the thesis holds up even better today. The west side gives you fully detached single-family homes on real lots, with garages, yards, and actual light.
Most single-family homes in the rest of the city sit on 25-foot-wide by 100-foot-deep lots, jammed so close to the street there's nowhere to park without blocking the sidewalk. The west side neighborhoods are the opposite. Big lots, set back from the road, tree-lined streets, room to breathe.
There's also a structural tailwind. I've written before about how local economic catalysts reprice neighborhoods years before the broader market catches on.
The AI buildout is the mother of all catalysts. Anthropic alone has leased close to a million square feet downtown. OpenAI's footprint exceeds a million. Databricks is expanding from a San Francisco base. That's tens of thousands of high earners who will eventually want to own, not rent.
When the demand wave hits, you want to already own the supply. The west side is where that supply lives, and it's still mispriced relative to what's coming.
The Work-From-Home Argument Changes Everything
This is the part I want you to sit with, because it's where the real value is hiding.
The single biggest objection to the west side is the commute. The offices are downtown or in Mission Bay, and the west side is, well, west. Ten or fifteen years ago, that mattered enormously. You were doing that drive or that train ride twice a day, five days a week, and every extra minute compounded into misery.
That world is gone. Most AI employees today are on a hybrid schedule. Two or three days in the office, the rest at home.
Run the math on that. If you commute three days a week instead of five, you've cut your annual commute time by 40% before you even pick a neighborhood. If you commute two days a week, you've cut it nearly in half. Suddenly the difference between a 12-minute commute from the Mission and a 24-minute commute from Forest Hill is almost irrelevant. You're talking about a handful of extra minutes, a couple of days a week, in exchange for a fundamentally better home and life the other five days.
That is one of the best trades in all of personal finance. You are arbitraging a small, occasional inconvenience for a large, permanent upgrade in quality of life.
The Herd Is Too Lazy To Explore, Which Is Your Opportunity
And here's the kicker. Because most buyers haven't fully internalized this shift yet, the west side is still priced as if everyone commutes five days a week. You get to buy the discount before the market reprices it. That is exactly the kind of inefficiency I've spent 20 years hunting in San Francisco real estate.
So if you can work from home two or three days a week, you shouldn't merely tolerate the west side. You should actively prefer it, and you should buy more land and a bigger home further out than your downtown-commuting instincts are telling you to. Let me show you where.
1. Forest Hill: The Best Value For Peace, Quiet, And Land
If you take one neighborhood away from this article, make it Forest Hill. For the AI employee, this is the sweet spot of the entire west side. It is one of the first planned communities in San Francisco, which is one of the reasons why it's so beautiful.
Forest Hill is a collection of grand, fully detached homes on winding, tree-lined streets, with lots far larger than almost anything else in the city. Homes are set back from the road behind lawns and gardens. It feels suburban in the best sense, a private retreat, while still sitting inside the city limits.
And thanks to the surrounding hills, Grand View Park, Golden Gate Heights, and Hawk Hill, much of Forest Hill is shielded from the fog that smothers other west side pockets. More sun than you'd expect this far west.
Here's why it wins on value. You get the space, the land, the quiet, and the detached home of an estate neighborhood, but at a friendlier entry point than its more famous neighbor next door.
For the price of a cramped, lot-line Victorian in a trendier-sounding district, you can own a real house with a real yard where your kids can actually play and you can host a dinner without your guests parked three blocks away. You might even be able to get that coveted enclosed front yard for your children and pets to run around safely.
This is the move if you value peace and quiet, want more square footage and more land per dollar, and can work from home a few days a week so the commute simply doesn't factor much. Forest Hill is where I'd tell a 35-year-old who just got liquid and is tired of explaining to their parents why they still rent to plant a flag for the next 20 years.
The Forest Hill Extension pocket near West Portal is worth a special look. You get city and ocean views and walkability to shops and transit, with the same large-lot character. It's my personal favorite corner of the four neighborhoods.
In addition, Forest Hill does have its own dedicated MUNI station to go downtown in 10 minutes. So if you need to commute downtown, it's easy to do.
2. St. Francis Wood: The Crown Jewel
If money is genuinely no object after your IPO, and for some of you it now isn't, St. Francis Wood is the trophy.
This is San Francisco's closest thing to a private estate enclave. Grand detached homes, fountains, manicured medians, mature landscaping, and lots that would be illegal to subdivide anywhere else in the city. It is consistently the most expensive street-for-street neighborhood on the west side.
The numbers tell an interesting story for a patient buyer. Depending on the source and the month, the median home value sits somewhere between roughly $3 million and $4 million.
St. Francis Wood is where you buy when you want maximum prestige, maximum lot size, and a home you'll hand to your kids. It sits right next to West Portal's commercial corridor, with tons of restaurants and bars. So despite the secluded feel, dining, shopping, and the MUNI Metro are minutes away.
3. Golden Gate Heights: The Best View Per Dollar
This is my contrarian pick, and the one I'd tell a savvy engineer to look at hardest.
Golden Gate Heights sits up in the hills above the Sunset, and the views are the best value in the entire city. Unobstructed ocean and Golden Gate Bridge panoramas from homes that cost a fraction of what an equivalent view commands in Pacific Heights or Sea Cliff. If you've ever stood on a deck up there at sunset, you understand why people never sell.
The trade-offs are real and worth naming. More fog than the estate neighborhoods, and a less manicured, more eclectic feel. But for someone who prizes privacy, light, and a view they'll never tire of, it's hard to beat on a dollars-per-wow basis.
One tactical tip: buy near the top of the hill. A few blocks of elevation is the difference between a sun deck and a fog bank. The micro-location matters enormously here.
In every international city in the world, panoramic ocean views trade at huge premiums. We haven't gotten there yet in Golden Gate Heights, which means there's tremendous opportunity.
4. West Portal: The Most Livable Of The Four
West Portal is the connective tissue of the west side, and the most livable option if you want a neighborhood, not just a house. West Portal has a fantastic restaurant scene.
It's anchored by an actual main street with restaurants, coffee shops, and the transit hub that makes the entire west side commutable. The homes are detached, the families are real, and the vibe is small-town inside a major city. It's the rare San Francisco neighborhood where you can walk to dinner and still own a garage.
If you have young kids or plan to, West Portal punches above its weight on day-to-day quality of life. I value that more every year, and as a full-time dad, I don't say that lightly.
If you appreciate everything within an easy walking distance, then West Portal is a great neighborhood. Just know that the easier it is for you to walk everywhere, the easier it is for others to walk to your house.
The Four Neighborhoods At A Glance
Price ranges are directional and move with the market. Treat them as a starting frame, not a guarantee. Always pull recent comparable sales before making an offer.
The Commute Reality, Neighborhood By Neighborhood
For the downtown and SoMa crowd, Anthropic and the rest of AI Alley, West Portal Station feeds the MUNI Metro straight into the city core. For OpenAI's Mission Bay campus, the 280 gets you there quickly by car. For Databricks employees, you've got both options depending on which office and which day.
None of these commutes is bad. And on a hybrid schedule, “not bad two or three days a week” is more than good enough to justify a dramatically better home the other five.
The One Mistake To Avoid: Don't Buy With Stock
I need to be direct here, because some of you are going to be tempted.
A handful of San Francisco sellers are now openly accepting Anthropic and OpenAI shares as direct payment for homes. One Duboce Triangle listing will take either. A Marin estate was listed for offers denominated entirely in Anthropic stock. I understand the appeal. You avoid triggering a tax event, and you get to keep some of the upside.
Don't do it.
You'd be trading an asset that could still multiply for a house that, historically, appreciates at a far slower clip. Both OpenAI and Anthropic also have to approve any stock transfer, so it isn't even a clean transaction. And concentration in a single illiquid stock is precisely the risk you should be reducing the moment you finally can.
Here's the playbook instead. Sell the shares you need. Pay the tax. Diversify the windfall across asset classes. Then buy the house with real money. Concentration built your wealth. Diversification is what keeps it. I lived through 2008 watching people who thought their one stock could only go up. That lesson is carved into me.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I buy a house with my OpenAI or Anthropic stock?
I'd advise against it. A few San Francisco sellers will now accept private AI shares directly, and it's tempting because you avoid a tax event. But you'd be swapping an asset that could still multiply for a house that appreciates more slowly, both companies have to approve the transfer anyway, and you'd be keeping the exact concentration risk you should be shedding. Sell the shares you need, pay the tax, diversify, and buy with cash.
What is the best San Francisco neighborhood for a tech family?
For families, I'd point to Forest Hill and West Portal. Forest Hill gives you the biggest lots, the most quiet, and detached homes with real yards. West Portal gives you a walkable main street, a strong sense of community, and the easiest commute of the four. Both are far more kid-friendly than the narrow-lot neighborhoods closer to downtown.
Is the west side of San Francisco a good investment in 2026 and beyond?
I think it's the best risk-adjusted real estate in the city right now. The hybrid-work shift made longer commutes far less of a penalty, but the west side is still priced as if everyone commutes five days a week. Add the wave of AI IPO wealth about to hit, and you have demand building against a market that hasn't fully repriced. That gap is the opportunity.
How does working from home change which neighborhood I should buy in?
Enormously. If you commute two or three days a week instead of five, you cut your annual commute time by 40 to 50%. That makes the extra few minutes from the west side nearly irrelevant, which means you can and should buy more land and a bigger home further out than a five-day commuter would. Forest Hill is the prime beneficiary of this math.
When are the big AI companies going public?
As of mid-2026, Anthropic filed confidentially on June 1 and could list as early as this fall. OpenAI is targeting a similar fall window. Databricks has signaled a possible 2027 listing, with most analysts pointing to the second half of the year. Timelines shift, so confirm current status before making decisions tied to a specific date.
How much of my windfall should go toward a home?
That's exactly the kind of question worth modeling carefully rather than eyeballing, because it depends on your total liquid net worth, your remaining concentration, your income, and your family situation. As a general principle, your primary residence shouldn't swallow so much of your wealth that you're house-rich and cash-poor right after finally getting liquid. This is the heart of what I help people work through.
Post home purchase, your home shouldn't be more than 50% of your net worth. In other words, if you want to buy a $5 million home, your net worth post purchase should be at least $10 million. But my recommendation is for 30% or lower post purchase.
My Bottom Line
If you're an AI employee about to get liquid, the west side of San Francisco is the smartest place in the city to deploy your windfall into a home you'll actually love.
Forest Hill for the value, the land, and the peace, especially if you work from home a few days a week. St. Francis Wood for even more prestige. Golden Gate Heights for the view. West Portal for the everyday life.
Buy the detached home on the real lot while the rest of the herd fights over narrow Victorians closer to the office. The hybrid-work shift has quietly made the west side the best risk-adjusted real estate in San Francisco, and most buyers haven't caught on yet. In 10 years, you'll be very glad you went west.
I've been investing in San Francisco real estate since 2003. I believe San Francisco real estate will see another 10 year boom with AI companies growing, forming, and going public.
If you're interested in San Francisco real estate and building more wealth, join my free weekly newsletter. I kickstarted the modern day FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) movement in 2009 with the launch of Financial Tips. Over 120 million readers have visited this site since. Further, I am an AI maximalist living in San Francisco.