Should You Wait to Sell Until After the AI IPOs? Here's My Honest Take.

Should You Wait to Sell Until After the AI IPOs? Here's My Honest Take.

A friend called me this weekend. She's getting ready to sell her home in the city — a real one, the kind of decision you don't make lightly — and she asked me the question I've been hearing everywhere lately.

"Should we wait until after the big AI IPOs?"

My answer was simple: I probably wouldn't.

Here's why.

The buyers you're waiting for are already here

There's a concept in economics called the wealth effect — the idea that people start spending differently the moment they expect to be wealthier, not just when the money actually lands. And right alongside it is something called consumption smoothing, which says households make decisions based on anticipated future income, not just what's in their account today.

What this means practically: the software engineer at Anthropic or OpenAI who's been watching her equity grow isn't sitting on her hands waiting for an IPO bell to ring. She's already in the market. She's already been pre-approved. She may have already lost two bidding wars in Noe Valley.

The wealth has been behaving like wealth for a while now — long before any S-1 gets filed.

There's also a whole financial system built to make waiting unnecessary

Two things most people don't realize:

First, secondary markets. Many of the AI companies currently in IPO conversations have already allowed employees to sell shares to private investors. The liquidity event, for a lot of these employees, already happened — quietly, without headlines.

Second, these employees can borrow against their shares as collateral. No taxes on borrowed money. Cash available. Ready to write offers.

By the time an IPO actually closes, a meaningful chunk of that buying power has already been deployed.

And here's the part that might surprise you: individual IPOs matter less than you'd think

I know that feels counterintuitive when the headlines are this loud. But the data from previous high-profile IPOs — Google, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Uber — didn't show dramatic spikes in SF housing before or after their public offerings. The market absorbed them. Life continued.

What actually moves this market? Broad equity wealth. When the NASDAQ runs 40–60%, that affects tens of thousands of households simultaneously. Nvidia's appreciation over the last few years has quietly created more purchasing power than most individual IPOs ever will.

Anthropic and OpenAI are genuinely transformative companies. They're also, each, a few thousand employees in San Francisco. The direct housing impact of their IPOs is real — and smaller than the coverage suggests.

Meanwhile, the SF market is already doing this

Sales-to-list price ratios in San Francisco hit 124% in May. That's not a typo. Inventory is tight. Competition is real, especially in the sub-$3M and luxury segments. The buyers are here. The demand is here.

The question isn't whether the market will heat up. It's already hot.

Waiting has a cost

The assumption behind the "wait for the IPOs" strategy is that things will only get better. Maybe they will. Markets can keep running. Confidence can keep building.

But 2022 is a useful reminder of how fast that can reverse. Tech stocks corrected sharply. The wealth effect evaporated. Luxury markets slowed. Buyers who had been aggressive went quiet almost overnight.

The same conditions that feel bullish today can look very different in six months. Nobody rings a bell at the top.

So what would I actually do?

If I were your neighbor and you asked me over coffee: I'd sell into this market. Inventory is low, which means your home gets real attention. Buyer demand is strong. The people who were going to be made wealthy by AI company equity are largely already acting like it.

You're not selling before the wave. You're selling in it.

Wondering what your specific timeline looks like? Let's run the real numbers on your home — no spin, just data