Ken DeLeon, founder of DeLeon Realty, promised his team a cruise to Cabo if it reached more than a billion dollars in sales this year. Getting on the water seems unlikely, but it isn’t all bad news.
DeLeon, whose team topped The Real Deal’s Bay Area brokers ranking from May 2024 to May 2025 with 149 transactions totaling $785 million, explained that the second half of last year was strong, and it was hard not to be optimistic about 2025 after the election, when President Donald Trump’s policies appeared favorable for Silicon Valley’s economy. That was before so-called Liberation Day.
“The tariffs were announced, and things kind of slowed down,” he said. After stocks plunged, the technology world really pulled back from real estate.
Nina Hatvany, who leads Team Hatvany at Compass, No. 7 onTRD’s ranking with 77 transactions totaling nearly $252.1 million, shared a similar sentiment, that buyers were all worried about what tariffs would mean for them so they put off buying.
Hatvany said San Francisco was having a great spring selling season and that her team had a number of $10 million-plus sales — until tariffs were announced. “We suddenly had this complete pause, where all the buyers were like, ‘Oh my God, what’s going on?’” Hatvany said.
“Silicon Valley feels like it’s back.”
It was a much more difficult market than what some in the local industry had experienced, according to David Gunderman, cofounder of the Gunderman Group with Keller Williams, No. 8 on TRD’s list with 145 transactions totaling $221.4 million.
“The tariffs, the sort of lurching economy, the drops and recoveries in the stock market, I think it just made people more cautious than normal during that spring time,” Gunderman said.
The situation has since calmed, and the year keeps getting better, DeLeon said. “We had a very successful June, where one week we sold $50 million worth of homes or so,” he said. “Silicon Valley feels like it’s back.”
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Hatvany said the mood in San Francisco has begun to recover, and her team happens to be having an active July, which is unusual for her. DeLeon has noticed something unusual, too.
The $15 million to $30 million market is the strongest it has been in years — reminiscent of early pandemic life — but the $2 million to $4 million segment, which tends to be the most frenzied, has cooled off. The success in the upper echelon may have to do with luxury real estate becoming a safety net for the wealthy amid stock market and geopolitical volatility. Such buyers sometimes pay all cash so they’re not worried about interest rates. At the lower range of luxury — sub-$4 million — uncertainty and tech layoffs are sources of weakness.
DeLeon is hopeful for what the rest of the year will bring. Still, the cruise isn’t likely. Hatvany finds the market is unpredictable, despite the recovery she noticed.
“Some properties are going immediately over asking, some are languishing,” Hatvany said, and it’s difficult to decipher why. Nonetheless, Hatvany thinks it’ll be a good rest of the year for San Francisco sales. “We’re always very stock market driven, and the stock market is back up,” she said.
Buyers generally have more confidence than they did in the spring, the agents explained. Still, brokers are adjusting. Some are spending more on promotions for listings and marketing more broadly and only taking on realistic sellers, rather than those who are overpricing by $1 million, according to DeLeon.
Because interest rates are still high, “you have to really be on your game,” Gunderman said, unlike periods when the market is so hot all you have to do is put up a for-sale sign and people line up with offers. Because the cost of buying a home is so high, the buyer pool has shrunk, and buyers who are looking are especially critical. “Your home has to be really well positioned and prepared for sale in a way that is going to capture [the buyer’s] attention, or else you’re really going to suffer in your outcome,” he said.
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