San Francisco’s most and least expensive homes this week

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.

A trip to Presidio Heights is a reasonably good education on how the other half lives—specifically, how the other one percent lives, as only the most well-heeled of buyers can cool their heels in a house like 3317 Washington.

This four-bed, three-and-a-half bath, 3,300-square-foot find listed in May asking $4.99 million. That’s quite a jump up the ladder of success from its already plush 2010 sale of just over $3 million. But 2010 was a much different time in San Francisco, as the seller, a local investment banker, well knows.

It certainly doesn’t hurt that the place is handsome without being presupposing, and that the most recent owners managed to hold the renovation bug at bay—other than a new roof in 2010 and a new room behind the garage a few years later, there are no recent building permits on file for the address.

In short, the only assets on offer for this sale were the house itself and the knowledge that a $3 million property in 2010 can dream of even bigger things today. With a right-on-the-nose $4.99 million sale secured this week, it looks like that dream came true.

Turning millions of dollars into even more millions of dollars might be the modern American dream, but the old-school formula of theoretically middle-class earners searching for a home to call their own hangs tight in neighborhoods like Bayview.

There, 1485 Van Dyke Avenue joined Curbed SF’s too-exclusive Under $700K Club with a $679,000 listing back in June. Also an ambitious move up from its last $419,000 sale in 2005.

It looks like this this three bed, one bath place circa 1906 was a fixer—or more precisely, it doesn’t look like much of anything, as the ads provided no interior photos and simply said there was “lots of potential.”

But not too long ago this place had some even bigger dreams of its own, with a 2010 permit for a horizontal addition that presumably would have sent its current demand in a vertical direction.

But that addition never added up to reality, with the permit eventually cancelled. In the end it all came out to a $620,000 sale this week, a lucky bid for whatever buyer now has the task of making this house a home.

• 3317 Washington [Paragon Real Estate]
• Permits, 3317 Washington [DBI]
• 1485 Van Dyke [Open Listings]
• Permits, 1485 Van Dyke [DBI]