Golden Gateway Commons, 640 Davis: two closings this year at $1,436 a foot, the top of the record, above an office podium its owner once wrote down to zero

640 Davis had its best per-foot year on record on two sales. Two condominiums closed between January 1 and October 15, 2026, against one in the same window of 2025; $4,510,000 of volume against $2,300,000. The median sale is $2,255,000 and the median price per square foot is $1,436, against $1,096 last year; the annual figure had run between $1,032 and $1,288 since 2017, and the building has never had five closings in a year.

#24, a 1,362-square-foot two-bedroom, closed at $2,200,000 on February 11 after 14 days, which is $1,615 a foot. #21, a 1,836-square-foot three-bedroom, closed at $2,310,000 on July 12 without listing; it was bought in October 2022 for $2,200,000, up 5 percent, and it is the year's one paired resale.

The building is one address in Golden Gateway Commons, Fisher-Friedman Associates' 1983 townhouse condominiums wrapping Sydney Walton Square on the top levels of a commercial podium, a 1982 Builder's Choice grand award and one of the works Rodney Friedman named as a favorite; a 1,836-square-foot unit here sold for $1,250,000 in 2002 (Builder; Movoto). A rental listing for #51 describes the Bay Club next door and a residents' walkway to the Embarcadero promenade (USF housing listing). The street index shows 52 units at this address; the building record on this site lists 24.

2026 so far, against the same window in 2025

Closings at Golden Gateway Commons — 640 Davis between January 1 and October 15, 2026, set against January 1 to October 15, 2025. Days on market is median days from listing to contract on MLS-listed sales; "under 15 days" counts how many of those went into contract inside two weeks.

Year by year

Every recorded closing at Golden Gateway Commons — 640 Davis since February 2002, by calendar year. 2026 runs through October 15, 2026. Days on market is available for MLS-listed sales from 2020 onward.

No year in the building's record holds five or more closings. 2026 year to date stands at $1,436 a square foot.

By bedroom count, 2025 against 2026

Every closing in 2026

All 2 closings through October 15, 2026, highest price first. Square footage and days on market are as recorded on the MLS; county-recorded transfers that never listed show no days.

Paired resales

Units that closed in 2026 and had a prior recorded sale in the same building. The change is gross, before any improvements, fees or carrying costs.

1 of these resold above the prior price, 0 below.

Davis Street, around Sydney Walton Square

The Commons run from Broadway to Jackson between Front Street and the Embarcadero, around Sydney Walton Square, the two-acre park by Peter Walker with Jim Dine's Big Heart on the Rock and the Colombo Market Arch, city landmark 311 (Hoodline; Wikipedia). The 294,000 square feet of offices beneath the homes, rebranded Embarcadero Square in 2015, is the podium Blackstone bought from Gaw Capital for $245 million in 2018, wrote down to zero and, in late 2023, was reported to be selling back to Gaw for about $90 million, about 40 percent vacant (Mingtiandi).

Three blocks west, the Transamerica Pyramid sold to Yoda Plc for $691.6 million in March 2026 and had signed about 126,000 square feet of leases by September 30; Beacon listed the Montgomery Washington Tower's offices at $150 million in August (Axios; CRE Daily; Hoodline). The nearest AI-linked addresses are LoveFrom's Jackson Square buildings four blocks west and the Jamestown startup leases at Levi's Plaza to the north (SF Examiner; Jamestown).

The timetable that every South of Market building now sits inside is the public-offering calendar. Anthropic filed a confidential draft registration with the SEC on June 1, 2026, a week after a funding round that set its valuation at $965 billion (TechCrunch). As of this week the Standard reports the Anthropic listing has been pushed to November, after the midterms, that OpenAI's has moved to 2027, and that Anthropic is weighing a lockup longer than the usual six months (SF Standard). The same piece carries a Redfin estimate that current and former OpenAI and Anthropic employees could in theory buy close to a third of the metro area's homes with their proceeds, and the counter-argument from UC Berkeley's Enrico Moretti and the Bay Area Council's Jeff Bellisario that the money is concentrated in fewer hands than past booms and that these firms create fewer jobs per dollar because so much goes to data centers rather than headcount. The record in this report ends on October 15. None of it reflects a single share that has been sold.

Two citywide facts frame every building figure here. First, the office recovery is lopsided: CBRE put Q3 2026 vacancy at 27.7 percent citywide, down 6.6 points in a year, but Avison Young splits that into roughly 12 percent for Class A and north of 31 percent for Class B, and a Presidio Bay executive told Bisnow the headline number is misleading for that reason (Bisnow). Second, the condo market is still digging out: the Chronicle's May analysis found that only eight Bay Area ZIP codes showed inflation-adjusted condo gains over the year, all of them in San Francisco, and that Noe Valley's typical condo remained close to $400,000 below its 2019 level in real terms (SF Chronicle).

How this was counted

Two records feed this review. The MLS layer is one row per listing and carries days on market and square footage. The county layer reaches back further and catches transfers that never listed, but records the same closing once per data source, so the two were merged on unit, date and price and each closing kept once. Below-market-rate units and transfers under $300,000 are listed but excluded from every median. "Same window" means January 1 to October 15 of each year. Nothing here is a valuation of any unit, and nothing here is advice.

Tim McMullen · CA DRE #02016832
tim@mcmullen.properties · (415) 691-9272