A $3 million San Francisco home is on the market, but the seller would rather not be paid in dollars.
The listing, for a two-level residence at 160 Noe St. in Duboce Triangle, says the seller will consider shares of OpenAI or Anthropic as payment, according to Realtor.com. (The platform was the first to report on the unique listing).
The 1907-built home spans roughly 2,495 square feet, with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a two-car garage, and recently underwent a two-year renovation that added new plumbing, electrical, and HVAC systems. The lower unit in the same building sold for $3 million, offering a comparable that helps anchor the asking price.
“A seller publicly advertising pre-IPO AI stock as an accepted form of payment is a landmark moment for home-buying,” Angela Cummins, an agent with Linda Miller Real Estate who spent more than two decades at L’Oréal before entering luxury real estate, told Fortune. “It legitimizes a conversation that has been happening in private negotiations for years and brings it into the mainstream.”
Why AI stock is suddenly so coveted
The sudden appetite for these particular shares comes from both companies racing toward potential public offerings, and skyrocketing valuations. Anthropic recently reached a record valuation of roughly $965 billion after a new funding round, surpassing OpenAI, whose most recent valuation has been reported around $852 billion. Anthropic confidentially filed paperwork for an IPO on June 1, potentially beating OpenAI to a Wall Street debut as soon as this fall. For the brief window before they go public, shares in these firms are among the most coveted assets in Silicon Valley.
Cummins predicted every luxury agent in America will be asked about alternative payment methods like this within the next 90 days. She frames the San Francisco listing as a leading indicator for markets far beyond California.
“What happens in the Bay Area tends to show up in luxury coastal markets like 30A about six months later,” she said, referring to Florida’s Scenic Highway 30A, where she is currently marketing a $10 million estate. “When AI IPOs land and that paper wealth becomes liquid, coastal luxury markets outside of California are going to feel it in a significant way. The buyers are already here. The money is almost here.”
A pitch aimed at the paper-rich
But the pitch for this property is aimed at a very specific buyer: an equity-rich employee of a private AI giant. Thousands of workers at OpenAI and Anthropic hold shares worth millions on paper and are restricted on how they can sell—leaving them, in effect, paper-rich and cash-constrained.
A deal that accepts the stock directly meets those buyers where they are, rather than forcing them to wait on a liquidity event. It follows a similar situation in April, when investment banker Storm Duncan offered his multimillion Marin County, Calif., estate in exchange for Anthropic shares and reportedly drew offers, including from Anthropic employees.
The San Francisco property has also reportedly already garnered a lot of interest.
“The listing received overwhelming interest within 24 hours,” Cummins said. “That tells you everything about how much pent-up demand exists among buyers who are wealthy on paper but can’t access their money yet.”
Finding a needle in a haystack
To be sure, Christine Krenos, a real estate agent at Douglas Elliman who works with clients in Silicon Valley, told Fortune that it could still be challenging to find the exact right buyer for this property.
Although in a market like Silicon Valley where “so much wealth is tied up in private company stock,” the challenge, she said, is how specific the ask is: “If the seller were open to a broader range of company stock, it could widen the buyer pool.”
“But when you’re asking for OpenAI or Anthropic stock specifically, you’re really looking for a needle in a haystack,” she continued. “The buyer would need to have access to that stock, be willing to part with it, and also happen to love this exact property. That’s a very specific set of stars that needs to align.”
The legal and tax knots
Krenos compared the moment to Bitcoin’s arrival in real estate, when the idea outpaced execution.
“Real estate is hyper-local and very personal. Stock is not,” she said. The legal, tax, and valuation questions are sticky: “This is not as simple as swapping one asset for another.”
Cummins agreed the complexity is real. Title companies, she noted, aren’t built for these deals yet, and the IRS treats them as taxable events, which makes it a challenge to pin down the fair market value of private shares.
