Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how differently momentum can behave in this market, especially in segments where inventory feels highly selective and heavily pursued the second it becomes available.
I have a client who has been pursuing a unit in a very specific building with great views. The first one they saw came early in their search and the timing moved too quickly for them to act. It quietly became the one that got away and, over time, the one we kept coming back to as a reference point for what they really wanted.
Then another unit surfaced, this time off-market and even more compelling, but they still needed time to come around to it. By the time it officially hit the market, they were ready. They stepped in, competed seriously and lost by a hair. It was one of those losses where they knew they had made the right decision not to stretch further, but that didn’t make it feel resolved. They went into first backup position for the property should it fall out of contract, and we kept moving forward.
Not long after, another opportunity surfaced, a true outlier with similar views. Again, they showed up exactly how a committed buyer shows up in a competitive market: strong price, clean terms, all cash, a quick close and even bringing in their own inspector early so there were no open questions. There were well over ten offers, and this time theirs was the highest by a hair, but the sellers still chose a different path.
I’m not sure who took that one harder, them or me, because it was one of those moments where even with a very strong position, you are still not in control of every variable.
And then, on the exact day they would have closed on that property, I got the call that their backup position on the earlier unit was going to be elevated.
What stayed with me afterwards wasn’t just the sequence itself, but the timing of it all. About ten minutes before that call came in, I had felt this very real wave of exhaustion, the kind that creeps in after a stretch of pushing hard in a market that has felt fast, competitive and at times almost impossible to keep up with, especially in certain segments where strong inventory continues drawing extraordinary buyer attention the second it becomes available.
And then that phone rang as I mentioned and the entire trajectory shifted in a way that none of us could have fully predicted from the outside looking in.
I tell clients all the time that stranger things have happened, especially in situations where it appears something is no longer possible but there is still technically a path forward. This is one of those moments I’m actually referring to when I say that. Not because it feels dramatic, but because it is a reminder that momentum in this market rarely moves in perfectly clean or linear ways.
Sometimes it accelerates quickly. Sometimes it stalls unexpectedly. Sometimes it looks completely lost right before reappearing again through a path that did not seem particularly likely a few days earlier.
And honestly, I think that is part of what makes this market feel so intense right now, because some buyers disappear emotionally from the market after one difficult loss, while others continue recalibrating and staying engaged long enough that eventually the right opportunity circles back in a way that initially seemed impossible to engineer from the beginning.
Inventory has improved meaningfully compared to the unusually constrained conditions of the last few years, and overall transaction volume has remained active, but buyer urgency is not distributing itself evenly across the market right now.
The charts this month reflect that tension clearly. New listings and inventory levels have expanded, yet days on market remain historically compressed relative to long-term norms, particularly for homes that combine location, views, design quality and emotional resonance. At the same time, sale-to-list ratios continue pushing higher, reinforcing how aggressively buyers are still competing when a property feels truly singular.
What I continue seeing across San Francisco right now is that momentum remains highly concentrated around inventory that feels truly differentiated, especially in segments where views, location, quality and emotional resonance align simultaneously. Buyers are moving decisively when those opportunities surface, but the path from interest to outcome rarely feels linear right now. In many ways, this market still feels defined less by broad uniform acceleration and more by highly selective momentum that appears, disappears and then unexpectedly resurfaces.
