Spring 2026 Market Update

Greetings, readers, and welcome to the Spring 2026 edition of The Binnings Team's The Edge!

Well… duh

The spring selling season has kicked off, and it is doing that San Francisco thing again. Inventory is down, sales volume is down, and yet market energy has ratcheted up. Wait, what!?

It's the same kind of cognitive dissonance we saw during Super Bowl week, when visitors arrived expecting a dystopian hellscape and instead got 70-degree February sunshine, world-class restaurants, nightlife, and epic scenery. The "San Francisco is dead" narrative remains laughably disconnected from reality. The City is on an exciting ascent, so fasten those seatbelts. For those who visited, we're glad you finally realized you've been lied to. And for the rest of us, well… duh.

The spring market will run through the end of June before quieting for the summer. January saw just 202 transactions in SF (all residential) versus 261 in 2025. That's a roughly 23% decrease. Either inventory is going to remain stubbornly low or the logjam is about to loosen. Marin, by contrast, saw 96 transactions last January versus 103 this year, a slight 7% uptick.

Mortgage rates have moderated and are currently sitting at levels not seen since September 2022, with the 30-year at 6.01% as of this writing. What's shifted entirely is sentiment. In 2022, the world was shocked by the 6-handle. The market froze, people panicked. Today, it's a welcomed sight, and if it dips into the 5's, that's a nice tailwind for real estate. Funny how the perception of rates is relative to where they just were as opposed to their face value. More food for thought.

What We're Bringing to Market

Speaking of tailwinds, we're loading the chamber with several new listings designed to take advantage of this spring energy:

• A gorgeous Pac Heights 3BD/2BA condominium in a Queen Anne Victorian at the corner on Buchanan, just two blocks from Fillmore.
• A dazzling 2BD/2BA Sausalito condo with floor-to-ceiling glass that fully collapses to a cantilevered deck and panoramic Bay views.
• A 3-story, 3BD/3BA Bernal Heights single-family perched above the city, offering 360-degree views from the Golden Gate Bridge to Twin Peaks to San Bruno Mountain and the East Bay.
• Plus a Nob Hill condo on California and a fixer on Douglass are in the works.

On the buy-side, we've got a long list of eager buyers waiting for inventory to arrive, and it can't arrive soon enough.

Probabilities Favor: Pass the Chips

Maybe you've noticed or have even been affected, but certain names in tech have been experiencing more volatility lately. Crypto and some of the high-flyers (for instance, $HOOD, $CRM, $NFLX, $APP) have experienced significant 35-50+% corrections, and certain sub-sectors like software ($IGV) are having what can only be described as a 2022-style "tech wreck", except this time we're calling it the "SaaSPocalypse." Following the "Liberation Day" market panic of April '25, we're seeing the next real gut check for those heavily concentrated in techquities (yes, I just made that word up).

Capital doesn't sit still. When it gets nervous in one place, it looks for somewhere safer to land. For months now, we've been watching people take chips off the table and rotate out of paper assets into hard assets like commodities, precious metals, and real estate. This cyclical pattern occurs after big financial market runups, and we're living it in real time.

How about some examples? There are a bunch so we're really just cherry-picking these:

• 3616 21st (at Sanchez) in Dolores Heights listed at $2,188,000 and just closed for $4,225,888. That's 93% over ask.
• 1640 9th Avenue in the Inner Sunset listed at $2,495,000 and just closed for $4,050,000. That's 62% over ask.
• And Peter Schiff just won't shut up about Gold.

In January, 32% of San Francisco transactions were all cash. In Marin, that number was 40%. Not quite half, but nipping at it. If that doesn't tell you where capital is moving, I'm not sure what does.

When this rotation happens en masse, it creates a genuine trend and a tailwind for real estate activity. Competition for homes in the back half of '25 and into the start of this year has certainly substantiated the thesis. Probabilities favor this trend continuing, at least for now.

The Setup

Signs are pointing up for both the San Francisco and Marin markets as 2026 unfolds. Lower financing costs. Renewed buyer activity. Capital rotation from equities. Liquidity events from secondary sales, a decent IPO pipeline, and public equity exits. People moving back to the Bay. Stack those tailwinds and you have a market (and people!) that want to move.

The best decisions tend to come from watching what's actually happening on the ground, not from headlines written three time zones away. See Super Bowl commentary above. And stay glued to The Edge.

The Binnings Team is at your service, so if you have friends, family, colleagues, or clients you feel would benefit from our experience and expertise, don't hesitate to put us in touch.

Till next time!

The Binnings Team