In San Francisco, some home sellers are now asking for OpenAI or Anthropic shares

When Nima Gabbay decided to sell his three-bedroom, two-bath San Francisco home for $2.995 million last month, his listing described the residence’s soaring 10-foot ceilings, a kitchen wrapped in Calacatta marble, remote-controlled skylights and an oversized two-car garage.

The 51-year-old real estate investor and developer also added an unusual clause: He would accept shares of OpenAI or Anthropic as payment for the house.

Two OpenAI employees soon came forward and offered some of their stock for the property, Mr. Gabbay said. One bid more than $1 million over the asking price, but appeared to inflate the value of his OpenAI shares. The other retreated when OpenAI filed for an IPO last month and decided to remain a stock.

Mr. Gabbay eventually went with a third buyer, who works in technology, and the sale is expected to close this week. He said he could not disclose the terms of the sale or the identity of the buyer because he had signed a non-disclosure agreement.

“There’s a bit of a gold rush in San Francisco right now,” Mr. Gabbay said. Selling the house was “a way for me to potentially get some of these shares and be part of the excitement of companies going public.”

Even before OpenAI and Anthropic hold initial public offerings, AI companies—which are based in San Francisco and are leading the AI ​​boom—are reshaping the city’s housing market. Sellers are demanding pre-IPO shares as down payment for homes, property prices are soaring as buyers bet that anything they overpay for today will look cheap tomorrow, and landlords are pushing out tenants to sell into a hotter market.

The maneuver is aimed at getting ahead of the wave of wealth when OpenAI and Anthropic, each valued at nearly $1 trillion, go public. Their IPO plus the recent IPO of Elon Musk’s SpaceX could create more than 16,000 millionaires and more than 20 billionaires, according to Sacra, a private market research firm.

Already, San Francisco sales of homes over $10 million have doubled in the past six months compared to a year earlier, said Joel Goodrich, an agent with Coldwell Banker Global Luxury.

44 homes closed for prices at least $1 million above their asking price last month, said Mike Simonsen, chief economist for Compass Real Estate. And there have been 144 such sales so far this year, up from eight in the first half of 2025. Fewer than 600 homes — including single-family homes and condos — are on the market today, according to Compass, about 40 percent below San Francisco’s average over the past decade.

The market is so crazy that a six-bedroom, seven-bathroom, 5,725-square-foot home in the Cow Hollow neighborhood overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz sold for $15 million in May, nearly double its $7.9 million list price, according to John Caruso of Sotheby’s International Realty.

Even in a city that experienced the late 1990s dot-com boom and large public offerings by companies like Google (in 2004), Facebook (2012) and Uber (2019), real estate agents and property managers said they had never seen anything like it.

“There’s hysteria right now,” said Pete Rodway, an agent with Compass who works mostly in the luxury market.

One of his clients, an OpenAI employee, was now looking to buy a $5 million house to beat out “a thousand other people who will have a $30 million budget,” he said.

Garret Spiecker, who works at Citizens Private Bank and describes himself as a “financial therapist” for sudden wealth, said he has advised dozens of OpenAI and Anthropic employees on how to navigate the housing market. He suggested they buy properties through trusts to protect their privacy, especially for homes over $5 million.

“In this cycle, which is different than some others, a lot of these individuals are very young and very rich quickly,” he said.

Antropic and OpenAI, which have not set dates for their IPOs, declined to comment. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. The companies have denied the claims.)

Techies who don’t work at OpenAI or Anthropic have accelerated their home buying plans. Sam Rosenstein, 31, a software engineer at software company Databricks, and his partner Michelle Huang, 31, who works in technology sales, jumped into the market this spring in part because they wanted to make a deal before the flood of AI wealth, Ms. Huang said.

“There was just a general acceptance that that time would eventually come,” she said.

Their urgency increased when Mr. Rosenstein’s landlord decided to sell his rental property to capitalize on the rising market. But the competition for the house was so fierce that one house the couple had bid $600,000 for in April ended up selling for about $900,000 more than its asking price.

In May, Mr. Rosenstein and Ms. Huang acquired a four-bedroom, two-bathroom in the Hayes Valley neighborhood for $2.185 million, bidding $385,000 over the asking price.

“When we made an offer on the house, the seller came back and said we could pay the offer we made, or we could pay less money but provide 60 hours of AI consulting” on a personal project, Mr. Rosenstein said. “That’s absolutely the weirdest thing that’s happened. They turned down the $10,000 discount.

Like Mr. Gabbay, other home sellers are adamantly chasing OpenAI and Anthropic shares.

In April, Storm Duncan, 56, founder of tech-focused investment bank Ignatious, quietly sold his 4,372-square-foot, four-bedroom, five-bathroom. compound in nearby Mill Valley, Calif. — with an infinity pool and views of the San Francisco skyline — on a LinkedIn page he created just for his house, which he estimates is worth about $8 million. He sent a direct message to Anthropic employees and investors, hoping to trade the house for stock.

The list went viral after someone at Khosla Ventures, the venture capital firm that invested in Anthropic and OpenAI, posted on LinkedIn, Mr. Duncan said. The California Post published article about the property soon after.

Mr Duncan withdrew the offer, although he said he would still do the deal if the right opportunity presented itself. Antropic is “closely focused on building a great product,” he said.

In May, Vijay Chattha, 49, a technology entrepreneur, listed his three-bedroom vacation home in Sonoma County wine country, an hour’s drive from San Francisco, for $500,000. discount of the $2.5 million price if the buyer paid in Antropia stock.

“I think Anthropic will grow faster than the real estate market, so why not just do the deal?” said Mr. Chattha. He added that he already had shares in OpenAI and wanted to use the deal to build a stake in Anthropic.

The vacation home, now listed at $2.35 million, did not sell. But Mr Chattha said he was undeterred. He also plans to list an apartment in San Francisco – also for AI shares.