Some things get better with age; home listings are not usually reckoned one of them, but there are exceptions.
The penthouse at 1080 Chestnut Street is currently the oldest public San Francisco home listing, having gone on the market way back in October of 2019; in fact, in two weeks it will be precisely two years since it first appeared, at the time asking $25 million.
Since then the price has tumbled multiple times, all the way down to $14.9 million in an effort to juice bidding, most recently just in August.
A lot of sellers will yank a listing after a couple of months and reintroduce it at a lower price after giving it a while to simmer, but some prefer to stick it out for the long haul. Two years is not a record-breaking amount of time to linger, but neither is it what we might call an unremarable span of time.
Out of more than 1,200 home for sale in San Francisco right now, only eight have been on the market more than a year; out of the more than 7,300 homes sold in SF in the past 12 months, just six sat on the market a year or more. Half of those were Below Market Rate units, meaning only three market-rate homes stuck around beyond the 12-month mark.
The Chestnut penthouse is a four bed, 5.5 bath pad sporting “wide corridors” and “a remarkable 19-ft high glass oculus,” perched atop a circa 1962 co-op building in Russian Hill. It was even the location of this year’s SF Decorator Showcase.
Why the long wait? Well, on one hand, it’s not necessarily unusual for a listing to find a buyer with $15-$25 million to spare.
However, in this case, time may be a factor as well: In the past two years, 12 SF homes have sold for $15 million or more, but just three in multi-unit buildings. Of those, two were in the new Four Seasons building at 706 Mission.
It’s not a big sample size to draw from, but it seems that in the time this penthouse has waited for a buyer, those with the funds were mostly looking for single-family homes or condos in newer buildings. All but three of those other $15 million-plus sales happened in less than 60 days, incidentally.
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