San Francisco Landlords are Paying Tenants $50,000 to Leave

San Francisco landlords are paying tenants to leave again, and the number of new buyout negotiations has climbed back to levels the city hasn't seen since before the pandemic, according to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis of data reported to the city. The median buyout from January through May ran about $50,000, and roughly 20 of them reached six figures.

Set that $50,000 against what it costs to live in the city afterward, because RentDataNow tracks a typical San Francisco rent of about $4,401 a month, which is $52,812 a year, so the median payout covers roughly 11 months of housing at the going rate. Tenant attorney Joshua Ezrin said that "even a six figure buyout is not going to last long" for someone paying market rent, and the data backs him up, since even $100,000 works out to about 22 months.

Kelli Little got the question in November 2024, weeks after a new owner bought the Richmond District duplex where Little had lived for about 15 years. He approached while Little was taking out the trash and handed over a legal notice asking her to name a price, and his attorney soon offered $2,500. Little and her partner didn't take it, and they turned down $3,100 the following year, because they liked the Marina-style building with its big sunroom and the rent-controlled two-bedroom ran about $2,800 a month near one of the mental health clinics where Little works.

The offers kept climbing while construction upstairs wore them down, and they eventually took $120,000 to be out by the end of last month. Market rents were too high for them to stay in the city afterward, so they've moved to the East Bay even though both of them still work in San Francisco.

"Even though we got a lot of money," Little said, "I would have been much happier to just have stayed there."

The gap between a rent-controlled tenancy and a market lease is the engine behind all of this. Little was paying about $2,800 against a citywide median of $4,401, a difference of $1,601 a month or $19,212 a year, which means a landlord recovers a $120,000 buyout in a bit over six years of charging the new rate. Selling recovers it faster, since a vacant building is worth considerably more than an occupied one.

Real estate attorney Daniel Bornstein, who represents property owners, didn't dance around it. "Part of my practice is brokering vacancies, because they increase value in property," he said. Bornstein also argued that paying is cleaner than fighting, because San Francisco does let owners evict a tenant in order to move in, but the law requires thousands in relocation fees and limits evictions of older or disabled tenants. "A dispute goes in between attorneys and the court and all of that. But a buyout is clean. It's magical," he said.

What's changed is the geography. Buyouts clustered in working-class areas like the Mission before the pandemic, and this wave is concentrated in wealthier ones including the Sunset, the Richmond, and Pacific Heights, with landlords opening about 50 negotiations in the Sunset and Parkside in the first half of this year against 30 in the same stretch of 2019.

Ezrin ties that shift to money from the artificial intelligence boom pushing more buyers and renters toward high-end housing in those neighborhoods, which fits what we found looking at how San Francisco rent has run past its own trend, up 26% over the past year and roughly 50% from its 2021 floor. Jennifer Fieber of the San Francisco Tenants Union board raised another possibility, that homeowners who left the city during the pandemic now want to come back.

There are protections around this. San Francisco's buyout law gives a tenant 45 days to cancel an agreement after signing it, and the city's Rent Board will answer questions about the rules, though it stops short of giving legal advice. Those safeguards matter, because not every offer arrives in good faith.

Julia Wobbe, founder of Wobbe Tenant Law, said some owners try to shrink a payout by claiming they intend to move into the unit, which would generally give them grounds to evict and weaken the tenant's position, when they actually plan to sell. "Unfortunately, we have some not-so-honest landlords in the city," she said.

Little says her landlord claimed he was moving his parents in, then gutted the place and sold it, and sale records show the building purchased for $1.8 million in November 2024 with the upper unit resold for $1.3 million in March 2025. The renovation still wasn't finished the last time Little saw it.

She calls the $120,000 life-changing money even after attorney's fees, and it still cost her nearly 16 years in one apartment and turned a 10-minute walk to work into an hour-and-a-half drive. Anyone weighing an offer should price it against local market rent first, because the number that matters isn't the check, it's how many months of rent that check actually buys.

Sources

• San Francisco Chronicle, "Rent buyouts are rising in S.F. again"

• San Francisco Rent Board, buyout reporting requirements and tenant protections

• RentDataNow San Francisco rent data (Zillow Observed Rent Index, June 2026)