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, kitchen wrapped in Calacatta marble, remote-control skylights and oversize 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 home.
Two OpenAI employees soon came forward offering some of their shares for the property, Mr. Gabbay said. One bid more than $1 million above the asking price, but appeared to inflate the value of his OpenAI stock. The other backed off when OpenAI filed to go public last month, deciding to hang on to the stock.
Mr. Gabbay ultimately went with a third buyer who works in tech, and the sale is set to close this week. He was not at liberty to disclose the sale terms or the buyer’s identity because he had signed a nondisclosure agreement, he said.
“There’s a bit of a gold rush situation right now in San Francisco,” Mr. Gabbay said. Selling the home was “an avenue for me to potentially pick up some of this stock and be a part of the excitement of the companies going public.”
Even before OpenAI and Anthropic hold initial public offerings, the artificial intelligence companies — which are based in San Francisco and leading the A.I. boom — are distorting the city’s housing market. Sellers are asking for pre-I.P.O. stock as payment for homes, property prices are surging as buyers bet that whatever they overpay today will look cheap tomorrow, and landlords are pushing out tenants to sell into the hotter market.
The maneuvering is aimed at getting ahead of the wave of wealth when OpenAI and Anthropic, each valued at nearly $1 trillion, go public. Their I.P.O.s, plus the recent public offering of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, could create more than 16,000 millionaires and more than 20 billionaires, according to Sacra, a private market research company.
Already, San Francisco’s sales of homes above $10 million have doubled over the past six months compared with a year earlier, said Joel Goodrich, an agent with Coldwell Banker Global Luxury.
Forty-four homes closed at prices at least $1 million more than their asking price last month, said Mike Simonsen, the 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 houses and condos — are on the market today, about 40 percent below San Francisco’s average of the past decade, according to Compass.
The market is so frenzied that a six-bedroom, seven-bathroom 5,725-square-foot home in the Cow Hollow neighborhood with views of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz sold for $15 million in May, nearly double the list price of $7.9 million, according to John Caruso of Sotheby’s International Realty.
Even in a city that lived through the late-1990s dot-com boom and major public offerings by companies like Google (in 2004), Facebook (2012) and Uber (2019), property agents and wealth managers said they had never seen anything quite like this.
“There’s a hysteria that’s out there right now,” said Pete Rodway, a Compass agent who works mostly in the luxury market.
One of his clients, an OpenAI employee, was scrambling to buy a $5 million home now to beat “a thousand other people that are going to have a budget of $30 million,” he said.
Garret Spiecker, who works at Citizens Private Bank and describes himself as a “financial therapist” for sudden wealth, said he had advised dozens of OpenAI and Anthropic employees on how to navigate the housing market. He has suggested they buy properties through trusts to protect their privacy, especially on homes above $5 million.
“In this cycle, which differs from some of the others, a lot of these individuals are very young and quite wealthy very fast,” he said.
Anthropic and OpenAI, which have not set dates for their I.P.O.s, declined to comment. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied the claims.)
Techies who do not work at OpenAI or Anthropic have accelerated their plans to buy homes. Sam Rosenstein, 31, a software engineer at the software company Databricks, and his partner, Michelle Huang, 31, who works in tech sales, jumped into the market this spring partly because they wanted to close on a deal before the flood of A.I. wealth, Ms. Huang said.
“There was just a general acceptance that that time will eventually come,” she said.
Their urgency spiked when Mr. Rosenstein’s landlord decided to sell his rental property to cash in on the rising market. But the competition for a home was so fierce that one house the couple bid $600,000 over asking for in April ended up selling for roughly $900,000 more than its asking price.
In May, Mr. Rosenstein and Ms. Huang landed a four-bedroom, two-bathroom in the Hayes Valley neighborhood for $2.185 million, bidding $385,000 above asking.
“When we put in the offer for the house, the seller came back and said we could pay the offer that we put in, or we could pay less money but provide 60 hours of A.I. consulting” on a personal project, Mr. Rosenstein said. “That’s totally the weirdest thing that has happened.” They declined the $10,000 discount.
Like Mr. Gabbay, other home sellers are unabashedly angling for shares of OpenAI and Anthropic.
In April, Storm Duncan, 56, the founder of the tech-focused investment bank Ignatious, quietly marketed his 4,372-square-foot four-bedroom, five-bath compound in nearby Mill Valley, Calif. — featuring an infinity pool and views of the San Francisco skyline — on a LinkedIn page he created just for his house, which he valued at approximately $8 million. He direct-messaged Anthropic employees and investors, hoping to trade the home for stock.
The listing went viral after someone from Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm that has invested in Anthropic and OpenAI, leaked the LinkedIn post, Mr. Duncan said. The California Post published an article about the property soon after.
Mr. Duncan took the listing down, though he said he would still do the deal if the right opportunity arose. Anthropic is “narrowly focused on building a great product,” he said.
In May, Vijay Chattha, 49, a tech entrepreneur, listed his three-bedroom vacation home in Sonoma County wine country, an hour’s drive from San Francisco, with a $500,000 discount off the $2.5 million price if the buyer paid in Anthropic stock.
“I think Anthropic is going to grow faster than the real estate market, so why not just do a trade?” Mr. Chattha said. He added that he already had OpenAI stock and wanted to use the deal to build a stake in Anthropic.
The vacation home, now listed at $2.35 million, has not sold. But Mr. Chattha said he was undeterred. He next plans to list a condo in San Francisco — also for A.I. stock.