A 773-square-foot, one-bedroom condo on the 23rd floor of Millennium Tower just rented for $10,000 a month, going to a tenant who works nearby in artificial intelligence. The deal closed on Oct. 31 and, according to the Compass agents who brokered it, marks the first time a downtown one-bedroom has crossed into five-figure monthly rent.
The unit's owners bought the otherwise unremarkable condo for their son in August for $660,000, according to The San Francisco Standard. He had a change of plans, and a month later his parents decided to rent the place out instead. Agents Sean Mamola and Trista Bernasconi, who represented the owners in their purchase, listed the unit at $6,800 a month — nearly double the condo's last asking rent of $3,600 back in 2022, according to Zillow figures cited by the Standard.
A Price Drop That Backfired, in a Good Way
The listing didn't move at $6,800, so the agents dropped the asking rent to $6,400 in mid-October. That lower price, counterintuitively, brought out a wave of competition, per the same account. One prospective tenant, who works in AI and needed to be close to the office, offered $10,000 a month along with a Nov. 1 move-in date to lock down the unit over other bidders.
Mamola said the renter needed to live close to work, while Bernasconi pointed to the tower's specialized programming and sense of community as part of its appeal.
San Francisco's Rents Are Breaking Records Everywhere
The $10,000 Millennium Tower deal lands amid a broader rent surge across San Francisco. The city's median one-bedroom rent climbed to $4,400 a month, up 25.4% year over year, according to a Zumper report cited by CBS News. Separately, the median asking rent for a one-bedroom was about $3,920 in September — the highest nominal figure on record — according to the San Francisco Chronicle, which also reported a 26% jump from the $3,110 average the city saw a year earlier using Apartment List data. The two outlets' figures differ, likely reflecting different datasets, but both point in the same direction: rents are climbing fast.
Zumper attributed the spike to hiring in the AI sector, which has fueled demand even as new housing supply stays scarce, the CBS News report states. Fewer than 1,000 market-rate apartment units broke ground across the San Francisco metro area in the year before July 2, 2026, per an earlier Standard report, while vacancy on Apartment List fell to just 2.6% in September, down from 3.8% a year earlier, according to the Chronicle.
Other Downtown Towers Are Seeing Similar Jumps
A one-bedroom corner unit at the Harrison in Rincon Hill rented for almost $6,800 a month this year, up from $5,140 the year before, the Standard reported in July.
San Francisco's rents also dwarf those in neighboring cities. The median one-bedroom in the city runs $1,510 higher than in San Jose, where it's $2,890 a month, and $2,300 higher than in Oakland, where it's $2,100, according to the CBS News report.
Life Inside the Once-Troubled Tower
Completed in 2009, Millennium Tower offers amenities that help explain the premium, including a fitness center and wine cellar.
The tower has also spent years working to shed its reputation as San Francisco's most famous sinking skyscraper. The building has been at the center of several lawsuits tied to its structural problems, according to the San Francisco Examiner. Repair accounts vary on specifics — one June 2023 account described a $100 million installation, reported that the piles transferred 18 million pounds of weight, and noted the tower's 29-inch tilt, with the work then expected to be fully completed by the end of August and coordinated with the city, while structural engineering firm SGH describes the work as installing 52 piles along the building's north and west sides down to bedrock, and a report from ENR describes a separate perimeter pile upgrade involving 18 new piles. Even with repairs underway, an expert told NBC Bay Area that it was too soon to declare the stabilization project a success.
The $10,000 rental suggests the structural history hasn't scared off tenants willing to pay for a view over Salesforce Park and the downtown skyline, a vantage point Mamola highlighted on LinkedIn in describing the unit.
