Cold plunges, circadian lighting, and robot closets aren’t on the typical home renovation checklist. But then again, the once-in-a-generation wealth creation coming from the Bay Area’s new wave of tech companies going public offers a singular shift in San Franciscans’ net worth, and a window into how the tech elite define the dream home.
The explosion of wealth that will follow a handful of history’s biggest initial public offerings is expected to reshape San Francisco and the Bay Area, with massive investments in new ideas, startups, and even philanthropic ventures. Space X’s massive IPO and upcoming IPOs from Anthropic and OpenAI could create 12,000 new multimillionaires, with a handful of people netting hundreds of millions, per The Washington Post.
But this peak in the region’s boom-bust cycle of tech wealth generation will also provide a unique look at the interior design trends and housing amenities favored by artificial intelligence aristocrats. Realtors have circled IPO dates on their calendars—as well as the days, months after the post-IPO lockups, when stockholders can sell—as key moments in a busy year to come.
Today, the Bay Area real estate market is in a frenzy. Home prices in San Francisco jumped 18% year over year, according to a report in March from the Compass real estate brokerage, with the average sale price breaking the $2 million barrier.
Michael Williams, a realtor and broker for TurboHome, says that certain desirable zip codes and neighborhoods have seen a nearly 10% price gain in home prices every month. The market is moving so fast, potential buyers and sellers are using pending sales to produce price comps.
“Everything is now very hyperlocal,” Williams says. “And this may be the slow part of the market, since the IPO money hasn’t really hit yet.”
A Gilded Age for the wellness set
In conversations with real estate agents, home tech firms, decorators and contractors, a picture of the trends and amenities that will reshape the San Francisco housing market has become clear. The focus is on quality and utility, especially in terms of security and wellness. Broadly speaking, this isn’t a Gilded Age—the sense is that new or renovated homes won’t be gaudy and flashy.
Instead, this will be homes with elaborate spas, seamless technology that blends into the background, and design that recreates high-end hospitality. For tech execs who spend significant parts of the year on the road and have the money to buy the best, a blurring of hotel and home makes sense.
“They get out of their bed at the Four Seasons, and their feet touch the floor and the lights go on,” says Tom Catalano, a partner of Springpoint Group, which focuses on custom home building for high-end tech executives. “They want that at home.”
Naming specific projects remains challenging. Many buyers in this cohort demand privacy and have designers sign nondisclosure agreements. In a change from recent years, some privacy-minded clients won’t allow contractors or builders to post finished projects to their portfolios, says Maor Greenberg, construction veteran and cofounder and CEO of Spacial, an AI-powered home design tool.
But it’s likely that a lot of postpurchase renovations will be taking place. Williams says supply in hot neighborhoods like Inner Sunset will be severely constrained. He sees most buying taking place in the $1.5 million to $2.5 million range, typically older and outdated homes in emerging areas that need work to measure up to contemporary demands.
“We tell buyers they need to make some compromises if they don’t want to pay 30% or 40% above asking price,” says TurboHome’s CEO, Ben Bear.
The new luxury
Right now, potential buyers or remodeling clients are likely talking to realtors, and perhaps architects, with the full wave of buying and then renovations to hit over the next year or so. Griffin Doninger, director of construction operations for MatPel Builders, says he’s seeing plans for many of these projects leaving the historic facades of existing San Francisco homes alone, due to preservation concerns, and instead building out and up, and in some cases, even adding more subterranean space.
Catalano at Springpoint Group compares the last six months to 2016, when an acquisition frenzy from Meta, then known as Facebook, minted many newly rich homebuyers. He says it’s a perfect storm—pent-up investment frenzy, with many trying to diversify their wealth into physical assets; a resurgence of San Francisco from the post-pandemic doom loop; and the soon-to-hit AI IPO frenzy.
This IPO wave comes at a time when the idea of luxury has shifted, says Ian Yang, founder and CEO of the high-end lighting manufacturer Gantri. What he’s seeing is a rise of the creative class—or perhaps of people who want to see themselves as members of the creative class, valuing their interests, pursuits, and wellness. It’s about designing an optimized, enhanced life.
“Time is the new luxury,” Catalano says.
Wellness includes things like high-end lighting to mimic daylight. Elaborate spa features include cold plunges and saunas and massage rooms, with some starting to ask for more elaborate features like hammams (Turkish or Moroccan steam baths) that are taking up a substantial portion of the home.
Greenberg at Spacial says the wellness demands carry over to elaborate water filtration systems and HEPA filters to see the homeowners through future wildfires and air-quality incidents. It’s part of a larger demand for control over the environment, he says. Some homeowners have spent $250,000 on lighting alone, seeking to adapt to circadian rhythms for health and eliminate harsh artificial illumination many say affect energy and wellness.
“Wellness has become standard in home renovations,” MetPal’s Doninger says. “What you used to see at a resort is now what you’re seeing at home.”
This trend has carried over to family time, including spending significantly more on kids’ rooms and amenities. “If I told you what some people are spending on treehouses and forts for kids, it would blow your mind,” Catalano says.
That family focus helps explain the interest in security. On top of all the new wealth that this cadre of buyers is now holding, recent high-profile home attacks, like the April molotov cocktail attack on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s Russian Hills home, have raised concerns. Buyers want shades that automatically close at night, and fences that block a pedestrian’s view of the home.
Security systems go well beyond alarms and cameras. They can include resilience from worst-case scenarios. Greenberg is seeing owners look to add gas generators that, along with their Starlink internet connections, will allow them to stay powered and connected in case of an emergency. Some are factoring in closeness to hospitals as part of their home purchase decisions.
Other potential buyers are looking at solutions still under development, says Yvonne McLaughlin, head of client satisfaction at Sauron, a local security startup that hasn’t made its offerings public, and aims to offer a comprehensive solution with round-the-clock surveillance, active deterrence, and in-market security teams. (Sauron also has an additional security team of former law enforcement and military members in Las Vegas in case of a severe disaster in San Francisco.)
She says requests have come from relatively lower-profile tech workers coming into more wealth and feeling unprepared, from a security standpoint, and clients who are looking at larger estates and seeking a more sophisticated approach to technology and security.
While there are plenty of high-tech touches within these homes—Catalano is overseeing his first project with a closet for storing and recharging humanoid robots—the overall trends aren’t favoring overtly elaborate smart homes. Despite, or maybe because of, a familiarity with tech, many of these clients aren’t asking for overly high-tech homes, or homes with very visible tech. Catalano says he’s even seeing requests for Faraday cages, structures that block electric signals and would render a room Wi-Fi and smartphone-free.
“It’s weird. The Big Tech people are pretty analog,” he says. “They just don’t want Big Tech in their homes.”
