Last month I got a call from a first-time buyer at 9:47 p.m. on a Tuesday. She was reading her home inspection report and had gotten to the part about "conditions conducive to the growth of wood-destroying fungi." She wanted to know if sh...
A friend of mine moved to The City last year from Austin. Software engineer. $200,000 base salary. He called me from his Airbnb in Hayes Valley, buzzing with that new-to-SF energy, and said "I'm ready to buy a house." I paused. No...
Last fall, a client of mine called from her apartment on Nob Hill. She'd just come from an HOA meeting where the board presented a special assessment estimate for fire sprinkler installation. The number was $247,000 per unit. She'...
Last week a client called me in a mild panic. She'd been pre-approved, we'd found a great two-bedroom condo in the Inner Sunset, and we were about to write an offer. Then she talked to her uncle. Her uncle... who is a general contra...
I watched an agent lose a deal last month because their buyer went home after an open house and asked ChatGPT what they should offer. ChatGPT pulled comps from the neighborhood (not wrong, technically), estimated a value range ...
There's a number floating around San Francisco right now that keeps making people's eyes go wide. Eighty-five percent. That's the share of single-family homes in The City that sold above asking price in early 2026. The average overb...
Courtesy of sfchronicle A Pacific Heights mansion just sold for $56 million. Let that sit for a second. Fifty-six million dollars. Off-market. No public listing. No open house. No Zillow link. Just a quiet transaction between peop...
Photo courtesy of Western Neighborhoods Project / OpenSFHistory Welcome back to Flashback Friday… a series where I share some of my favorite weird, wonderful, and occasionally hidden stories from San Francisco's past. The City has laye...
San Francisco was once called the Paris of the West, and if you're old enough to remember what Union Square used to feel like on a Saturday afternoon, you know exactly why. It wasn't just the stores. It was the weight of it. The idea that ...
I serve on the board of Beyond Rescue, a San Francisco dog rescue. I foster dogs. I write their bios. I show up at adoption events and try not to cry when the good ones go home (and sometimes when the difficult ones do too, becaus...
The Westfield site has lived three distinct lives in my lifetime, even if the address never changed. First came the Emporium era, the version that still feels like a childhood artifact. Every December, the rooftop Christmas setup...
The other afternoon I was at my desk in The City doing the kind of work that never appears in glossy real estate marketing. Pulling comparable sales. Studying recent transactions. Trying to understand why one San Francisco home sold...