San Francisco is a single jurisdiction that is both a city and a county, forty-nine square miles with more housing-law complexity than counties twenty times its size. Most of what an appraiser needs to resolve here is legal rather than physical: what form of ownership is being valued, and who occupies it. I take desktop and retrospective assignments citywide, with no property visit.
City & County of San Francisco at a Glance
The building stock is unusually uniform in age and unusually varied in form. The eastern neighborhoods, the Mission, Noe Valley, the Castro, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, Hayes Valley and Pacific Heights, are dominated by Victorian and Edwardian flats and single-family houses, many of them two, three or four units under one roof, built before the city had a zoning code. West of Twin Peaks, the Sunset and Richmond districts are block after block of 1920s through 1940s rowhouses over garages, with St. Francis Wood, Forest Hill and Sea Cliff adding planned early-century enclaves. The southern neighborhoods, the Excelsior, Visitacion Valley and Bayview, hold more modest detached and semi-detached stock. SoMa, Mission Bay, Rincon Hill and Transbay are the newest layer: high-rise condominiums and mid-rise infill on former industrial land. Assignments arriving from the city are overwhelmingly estate and trust valuation, dissolution of marriage, partnership and co-ownership disputes, and litigation support, with tax appeal and review work alongside. The analytical problem is almost always ownership structure and occupancy, not construction. Ownership forms complicate every neighborhood in that list, because a three-unit Edwardian in Noe Valley may be held as a single parcel, as three condominium units, or as fractional interests among three owners, and the recorded documents rather than the building determine what is being appraised and which sales are relevant to it.
What I Account For Here
Tenancy-in-common, condominium and stock co-operative interests all trade here, often in buildings that look identical from the street, and they are not interchangeable: fractional interests sell at a discount to condominium units, condominium conversion is limited by ordinance, and the deed and any TIC agreement have to be read before comparables are chosen. The Residential Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Ordinance governs most pre-1979 units, so an occupied flat with a long-tenured tenant is a materially different asset from a vacant one, and the history of Ellis Act and owner move-in activity in a building matters. Soft-story retrofit obligations attach to many older wood-frame multi-unit buildings. Liquefaction and seismic hazard mapping covers the Marina, SoMa, Mission Bay and Islais Creek fill. View corridors, fog exposure and hill orientation move value over very short distances. Lots are small, parking is frequently absent, and accessory or legalized units are common.
Courts, Assessor and Recorder
Filings are made in the Superior Court of California, City and County of San Francisco. The Probate Department sits at the Civic Center Courthouse, 400 McAllister Street, with probate clerk windows on the first and second floors; the court's Unified Family Court is housed in the same building. Uniquely among the counties I serve, assessment and recording are combined in one office, the Office of the Assessor-Recorder, City and County of San Francisco.
Scope of Service in City & County of San Francisco
Everything I prepare for San Francisco is a desktop or retrospective appraisal, developed without entering the property. The report states that plainly. Because ownership form drives value here, I document the interest appraised from the recorded instruments, rely on listing history and photographs for condition, and set out each extraordinary assumption I had to make.
Communities Served in City & County of San Francisco
Each of these community has its own page covering the local market and the valuation issues specific to it.
Appraisal Services Available in City & County of San Francisco
- Date of Death Appraisals
- Estate & Trust Appraisals
- Private Party & Gift Tax Appraisals
- Divorce Appraisals
- Proposition 19 Appraisals
- Property Tax Appeal Appraisals
- Bankruptcy Appraisals
- Expert Witness & Litigation Support
- Appraisal Review
- Desktop Appraisals
- Rental & Income Analysis
- Pre-Purchase Appraisals
- Pre-Sale Appraisals
- PMI Removal Appraisals