San Francisco Condos Rebound as Covid’s Effects on the Market Dwindle

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The San Francisco condominium market, which suffered during the Covid-19 pandemic, is roaring back to life.

There were more than 1,300 sales of condos and co-ops in the city in the three months ending in May, according to a report Monday from Compass. That’s the most in at least 16 years, when the company started tracking the data.

Condo prices are also on the rise, with the median price of a two-bedroom condo reaching $1.325 million in the three months ending in May, the report found. That’s up from a low of $1.2 million in the three months ending in January.

Buyers, turned off by soaring single-family houses prices, may “have now identified condos as a particularly good deal in comparison,” Patrick Carlisle, Compass’s chief market analyst in the San Francisco Bay Area, said in a statement about the report.

In the early days of the pandemic, some buyers had concerns about sharing spaces such as elevators and lobbies with strangers, but “with the rollout of vaccines, the fears that troubled the condo market appear to be rapidly dwindling,” Mr. Carlisle added.

Spring sales of luxury condos, those priced at $2 million and above, hit an all-time high, the data showed. Transactions, meanwhile, rose more than 50% above their previous peak in spring 2018. There were nearly 60 such sales in the three months ending in May, compared to fewer than 10 in the same time period in 2020, when economic shutdowns and concerns over the virus severely limited transactions.

Luxury single-family house sales in San Francisco—$3 million and up—also registered a new record, seeing a 70% spike compared to the previous peak in spring 2019, the report found. There were almost 60 deals in the three months ending in May, compared to about 15 in May 2020.

“This is a common dynamic around the Bay Area, and indeed other counties have seen greater —sometimes stupendous—increases in the sales of expensive homes,” Mr. Carlisle said. “Generally speaking, spring 2021 luxury home sales in the Bay Area were up 103% over spring 2019 (pre-pandemic).”

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