San Francisco’s most and least expensive homes this week

A lot can happen in a week on San Francisco’s molten-hot housing market. To keep caught up, every Friday Curbed SF examines the High & the Low, a look at the single most and least expensive publicly listed homes sold in San Francisco over the last seven days. Here’s who broke the ceiling and who laid the foundation this week:

Arguably, Russian Hill might be San Francisco’s most iconic neighborhood, with cable cars rolling past the Lombard Street curves and easy to come by views of the city’s most oft-photographed landmarks beyond Alamo Square.

It’s also the site of the city’s real modern landmark: astronomically high real estate prices. Again the neighborhood takes the top spot with the most expensive publicly sold home in San Francisco, this time at 1090 Chestnut #2, a four-bed, four-and-a-half-bath co-op unit in a circa-1927 building so tasteful that it even warranted a mention in the late owner’s death notice in 2016.

Previously, Curbed SF praised the 1090 Chestnut building as “the 181 Fremont of its time”—that is to say, a building boasting gorgeous design, a locale in the hottest possible neighborhood, and also an incredibly intimidating price tag.

When it listed in September for $6.85 million, the number-two unit was considerably cheaper than most of its neighbors in the same building. The last time 1090 Chestnut made it into High/Low—back in December of 2016, with a listing that referenced the building’s appearance in cinematic history as one of the sites for the 1947 Humphrey Bogart movie Dark Passage—the price was $8.82 million.

By comparison, demand humbled this home a little bit, driving the final price this week down over a million dollars to $6.7 million. Although the lucky sellers are unlikely to be missing that extra $1.85 million given the size of the rest of the haul.

Courtesy Deborah Svoboda

This week’s least expensive home is quite a beautiful piece of NoPa work (circa 1907) in and of itself, at least as far as the view from the curb and its gentle, lavender Victorian frontage is concerned.

Inside, the small (only about 300 square feet) #25 studio apartment that just sold has no small measure of class of its own, although the presence of the weirdly-placed loft bed is a hard to figure out.

(Or then again, maybe it’s not so difficult when one considers the small dimensions of the place again.)

The relative bargain in this case came by way of a probate sale in mid-January where the auction price started at $420,500. The final closing price went over that but not by much, landing at $440,000 altogether.

• Patricia Ravitch [Legacy.com]
• SF’s Most and Least Expensive Homes, Dec. 2016 [Curbed SF]
• 1090 Chestnut, #2 [Sotheby’s]
• 625 Divisadero, #25 [APR]