San Francisco’s most and least expensive homes this week

This time it pays to go low in Potrero Hill

By Adam Brinklow Jul 21, 2017, 2:42pm PDT

Friday is time for the High & the Low, a Curbed column chronicling the most and least expensive homes sold in San Francisco in the last seven days. Here’s this week’s pageant of extremes.

Back in May the brick-clad Georgian masterpiece at 2502 Jackson, circa 1930, made a pitch for its first sale in over 20 years, hoping to bring in as much as $7.4 million.

At the time, Curbed SF hailed the five-bed, five-and-a-half-bath, roughly 4,000-square-foot feature presentation as everything “one might imagine when they think of Pacific Heights: brick facade. Harlequin windows. Mini-sweeping staircase. Alta Plaza Park. Opulence.”

There’s even a hidden space supposedly built to hide hootch back during the prohibition days.

It’s not clear whether or not that’s the sort of thing most people imagine when they think of Pacific Heights, but who doesn’t like having a little bit of extra history in the pantry?

For decades, late union labor booster Gibbs Brown owned this speakeasy spot but apparently was more attached to another home in Nob Hill where he lived for some time instead, even when the racket of a picket line at the Fairmont Hotel nearly drove him batty in 2004.

Despite its ambitions of breaking $7 million, when this Georgian peach actually sealed the deal this week the total came to $6.6 million. A significant shortfall from the asking, but also far more than the $1.67 million it went for back in 1993. (Note that’s $2.87 million after inflation.)

Meanwhile, the city’s least expensive home sold this week (among publicly listed homes, that is, and not counting BMR or other special subsidized forms of housing) rolled a low-ball right at the edge of Mission Bay, a block away from the houseboats in Mission Creek.

Here at 888 Seventh Street, a studio with linoleum floors and less than 500 square feet of space, from one end to the other, rang up a charge of $600,000 after five weeks on the market, a sizable improvement over the $549,000 it asked for and its $401,000 sale in 2012.

So, which was the harder bargain, the big house with the big price tag that came up short of its most soaring ambitions, or the small place that topped its own expectations for less? As usual, it probably depends which set of keys you’re holding.