‘A million dollars over asking’: AI wealth is fueling housing market frenzy in San Francisco

Just a few years ago, San Francisco was the national symbol for post-pandemic urban decline.

Now, fueled by the artificial intelligence boom, the Golden City and its suburbs are quickly becoming the hottest housing market in the country.

Flush with cash — and highly valued stock options — tech workers are flooding in to the housing market, bidding up the price of homes and, increasingly, even rental properties.

San Francisco home prices are growing at their fastest pace in nearly a decade, with the median home selling for $1.7 million, according to Redfin. Compare that to the national median home price, which was $440,600 in June, according to the National Association of Realtors. About one in three home sales in the Bay Area were all cash from April through June, Redfin found. That’s up significantly from a few years ago.

San Francisco is seeing many “newly minted millionaires” in the AI space bidding for homes on the market, John DiDomenico, a local real estate agent, told CNN.

These new entrants to the housing market are now competing with employees from and investors in tech giants like Google, Apple and Meta for homes, creating a “frothy, very hyper-competitive market” in the city, DiDomenico said.

OpenAI’s office building in San Francisco, March 25, 2026. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

In the past few months, it has not been uncommon for a high-demand home to receive offers that are more than $1 million above the original listing price, DiDomenico said. He recently worked with a client who listed a home for $6.5 million. It received multiple offers, including several for hundreds of thousands of dollars above the asking price. The seller ultimately accepted an offer of more than $8 million.

“We’ve never really seen this before,” he said of the city’s real estate industry.