What actually changed for the buyer who closed on a Dogpatch condo this July compared to one who closed the same unit type in July 2025? The bidding war looks familiar. The paperwork sitting in the disclosure packet does not.
Condos in San Francisco spent much of the pandemic era as the market's slow lane. That has flipped. Units in the Financial District, Dogpatch, and Mission Bay that once lingered are now going under contract within two weeks, and buyers who were priced out of single-family homes are treating condos as their real path into the city. The recovery is genuine. But it arrived at the same moment two overlapping compliance changes reshaped what a condo seller has to hand over and what a condo buyer's lender is now required to check. Neither change is well understood yet, and both hinge on a single document most people didn't know existed until this year.
The Comeback, With Numbers
San Francisco's single-family market has been the headline story of 2026, with the median sale price reaching $2,140,000 in May 2026, up sharply from a year earlier. Condos moved more quietly but just as meaningfully, with the median condo price up 12.8% year over year as of that same May reading, and townhome prices up 16.6%. Citywide, homes were selling in around two weeks on average over the spring months, a pace that puts real pressure on buyers to remove contingencies fast.
That pressure is exactly why the paperwork question matters. A buyer moving quickly through a multiple-offer condo purchase has less time than ever to catch a problem buried in the HOA's files. And this year, for the first time, one specific file is guaranteed to be in that stack.
The Report Nobody Was Required to Hand Over Last Year
Signed into law in 2019, a California statute requires condominium HOAs of three or more units to inspect exterior elevated elements, meaning balconies, decks, stairways, and walkways more than six feet off the ground that rely substantially on wood framing. That law, Senate Bill 326, set an initial inspection deadline of January 1, 2025, with no extension. A separate law covering apartment buildings, Senate Bill 721, did get an extension, pushed to January 1, 2026. Multiple industry sources note that condo boards have repeatedly confused the two, assuming the apartment extension applied to them. It never did. Any HOA that missed the January 2025 deadline has been out of compliance for more than a year.
What changed on January 1, 2026 is Senate Bill 410, sponsored by the California Association of Realtors according to the Senate Judiciary Committee's analysis of the bill. SB 410 takes the SB 326 inspection report and folds it directly into the standard HOA resale disclosure package required under Civil Code section 4525. Before this year, a buyer might have to ask specifically for balcony inspection records. Now the most recent report is a required part of the documents a seller must provide, and it has to include a specific summary on its first page: inspection date, total units in the project, number of units with elevated elements, number of elements inspected, and whether any pose an immediate safety threat.
That sounds like a paperwork footnote. It isn't. Inspections completed since the 2025 deadline have turned up real structural problems in buildings across the state, and special assessments tied to those findings have run from roughly $40,000 to as much as $175,000 per unit in the most severe cases. Jeff Beaumont, an HOA attorney at Beaumont Tashjian, has told industry press he has personally seen assessments at the top of that range. A buyer who used to skim past HOA meeting minutes now has a document, required by statute, that says plainly whether their building has this problem.
San Francisco Adds Its Own Layer
State law is not the whole story inside city limits. San Francisco has run its own exterior elevated element rule since 2002, under Section 604 of the city's Housing Code. It covers apartment buildings, residential condominium buildings of three or more units, and hotels, and it is enforced locally by the Department of Building Inspection's Housing Inspection Services division rather than by the state. Two things make it stricter than SB 326. It requires inspection of 100% of a building's qualifying elements rather than a statistical sample, and it recurs on its own schedule independent of the state's nine-year cycle, which different inspection firms describe as either five or six years depending on the source.
The practical effect is that a San Francisco condominium can be compliant with the state's rule and still owe a separate filing to the city, or the reverse. Being able to say "we passed our SB 326 inspection" is not the same statement as "we filed our Section 604 affidavit with DBI," even though both cover the same balconies and stairways.
| Rule | Applies to | First deadline | Inspection standard | Enforced by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SB 326 (Civil Code §5551) | Condo HOAs, 3+ units | January 1, 2025, passed | Statistically significant sample | HOA board, civil liability |
| SB 721 (Health & Safety Code §17973) | Apartment buildings, 3+ units | January 1, 2026 | Flat 15% sample | Local code enforcement |
| Section 604, SF Housing Code | SF apartments, condos, hotels | Recurring, five to six year cycle | 100% of elements | SF Dept. of Building Inspection |
A San Francisco condo can pass state inspection and still be out of compliance with the city. That gap is where most disclosure surprises live.
The Lending Wrinkle That Just Landed
Financing tightened at almost the same moment. On August 3, Fannie Mae eliminated the streamlined Limited Review approval pathway for condo buildings with 11 or more units, requiring full underwriting of the HOA's finances, reserves, and known deficiencies for any conventional loan closing after that date. Buildings with an incomplete or unfavorable SB 326 report are exactly the kind of finding a Full Review is built to catch. A downtown high-rise that would have sailed through a quick lender check in 2025 may now face weeks of additional documentation if its balcony report or reserve study has a gap.
For a buyer racing a two-week average market, that is not an abstract risk. A financing delay caused by an HOA document nobody asked for last year can cost a buyer the deal in a market moving this fast.
What This Actually Means for a Transaction Right Now
For anyone buying or selling a San Francisco condo this season, a few habits are worth building into the process from day one rather than after an offer is accepted.
- Order the HOA's Civil Code §4525 disclosure package the day a listing agreement is signed, not after an offer comes in. The SB 326 report now travels with it.
- Ask specifically whether the building has completed its SB 326 inspection and whether that finding has been folded into the current reserve study, since an inspection without an updated reserve study is legally incomplete.
- Check the building's unit count against the Fannie Mae Full Review threshold. Anything at 11 units or above is now underwritten more thoroughly than it was just last week.
- Confirm Section 604 status separately from the state inspection. A San Francisco building can pass one and still owe the other.
- Read board meeting minutes for any mention of an upcoming special assessment discussion before removing contingencies, not after.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Directly
Does the 2026 extension for balcony inspections apply to my condo? No. The extension to January 1, 2026 applies only to SB 721, which covers apartment buildings. The deadline for condominium HOAs under SB 326 was January 1, 2025, and it was not extended.
What if my building's HOA hasn't completed its inspection yet? The building is currently out of compliance with state law. That status now has to be disclosed as part of the standard resale package under SB 410, and it can affect insurance renewal and loan approval independent of any sale.
Does Section 604 apply to a smaller condo-converted building, like a converted Victorian? It can. Section 604 covers residential condominium buildings of three or more units within San Francisco regardless of the building's age or architectural style, separate from whether the state rule applies to the same structure.
San Francisco's condo market earned its comeback headlines this year. The paperwork behind that market changed just as fast, and most of it is new enough that even people who bought a condo here two years ago haven't seen it. If you're weighing a condo purchase or sale in the city right now and want a second read on what a building's HOA documents are actually saying, Young & Gravenius is a good place to start that conversation. Let's Connect.
