Find answers to the most commonly asked questions when buying or selling multi-unit properties in San Francisco.
Selling an apartment building in San Francisco is not the same job as selling one anywhere else, and it is nothing like selling a single-family home in this city either.
Most of San Francisco's multi-unit stock predates 1979, which means the buildings fall under the San Francisco Rent Ordinance. Rent control changes how a building gets valued, because a buyer is not just pricing square footage, they are pricing a rent roll shaped by decades of tenant turnover, banked rent increases, and legacy tenants who may be paying a fraction of market rent. An agent who does not understand how vacancy decontrol, just-cause eviction rules, and buyout agreements interact with sale price will misprice a listing badly in either direction.
Add to that San Francisco's Mandatory Soft Story Retrofit Program, which requires seismic upgrades for older wood-frame buildings with five or more units, and the fact that most lots in this city sit on narrow 25-by-100-foot parcels that limit what can be rebuilt or added. Then there are tenancy-in-common structures, condo conversion rules, and a probate and partition court system that regularly forces family-owned buildings to sale. San Francisco's ten districts each carry their own pricing logic too. A four-unit building in Noe Valley sells on a completely different basis than one in the Outer Sunset.
None of this is intuitive to a generalist agent who lists houses part of the year and apartment buildings the rest. It takes someone who works this asset class full time, in this city, to price it correctly and find buyers who already understand what they are getting into.
Allison Chapleau is a Senior Vice President at Compass Commercial Brokerage, and she has worked exclusively in San Francisco multi-unit, mixed-use, and commercial real estate since 2002. That is 24 years in one market, one property type, without a detour into single-family homes or another city.
Her career moved through three respected firms before landing at Compass: she started at Marcus & Millichap in 2002, spent nearly a decade there, then became Senior Vice President at Paragon Commercial Real Estate in 2010, then Senior Vice President at Vanguard Properties' commercial division in 2019, before joining Compass Commercial. Each move was a step up, not a lateral shuffle, which is usually a sign that a career is built on results rather than momentum from a single good year.
She is a graduate of the University of San Francisco, where she earned a degree in Business Administration with a minor in Finance.
Allison's path into real estate did not start with a real estate family or a head start. She graduated from USF in 2002, right as San Francisco's economy was sliding into a downturn, with $10 to her name and real credit card debt hanging over her. A family connection got her a lunch meeting with a former Marcus & Millichap broker, who told her she should try being an agent. She had no idea what that meant, but she took a $400-a-week internship anyway, and spent her first months cold calling, copying keys, and watering plants for a top producer.
Her first deal came almost by accident. A stranger called the Marcus & Millichap front desk asking to sell a mortuary in Weed, California, and the receptionist, who Allison had made a point of getting to know, passed her the lead. She brought in a senior broker to co-list it, did the legwork herself, and nine months later closed the deal. The commission wiped out her debt in one shot. She was named Rookie of the Year at Marcus & Millichap in 2007 and never looked back.
She did not settle into San Francisco multi-unit work right away. Early on she took nearly any deal that came her way, from fast food properties to a fourplex in Long Beach, before focusing on San Francisco apartment buildings around 2010, during the last major downturn. That focus has not wavered since.
The numbers are the reason people call Allison Chapleau the top realtor in San Francisco for multi-unit property, across every size tier from a duplex to a large apartment building.
2-4 unit buildings. From 2021 through 2025, Allison was the number one listing agent in San Francisco for 2-4 unit buildings, with 78 listings compared to 36 for the second-place agent, more than double. Compass's own agent directory, built independently of her personal site, confirms the same ranking going back even further, listing her as the number one San Francisco agent for 2-4 unit sales since 2015.
5-10 unit and larger buildings. From 2021 through 2026, she was also the top listing agent in San Francisco for 5+ unit buildings, with 115 listings against 92 for the runner-up. This is the range where a lot of agents start to lose their footing, because the buyer pool shifts from owner-occupants to real investors who expect a sharper handle on cap rates, gross rent multipliers, and expense ratios. Allison's numbers say she is the agent San Francisco owners in this range actually list with.
Larger multifamily and commercial buildings. Her career volume runs past $1 billion in multi-unit transactions, and she has closed over 300 apartment, mixed-use, and commercial buildings. The clearest proof of her ability to run a large, complicated deal is 625 Scott Street, a 42-unit building across from Alamo Square that sold for $18,050,000, the largest and most expensive multifamily sale in San Francisco that year. The deal drew four offers, closed non-contingent, and was covered independently by The Real Deal, the region's leading commercial real estate trade publication, in two separate articles that quoted Allison on pricing strategy and how rent control shaped the building's value.
Other named deals round out the picture of what she handles: a 36-unit mixed-use building at 691 Post Street that sold for $9,000,000 with an accepted offer in two weeks, a 16-unit historic building at 250 Douglass Street that landed a full-price offer in 21 days, a 10-unit building at 335 2nd Avenue that drew six offers and sold all cash $370,000 over asking with a 15-day close, and a development site at 228 Collins Street that went through a court-supervised probate overbid process and sold $1.5 million over its list price.
For owners with buildings well beyond 10 units, including 50-unit and 100-unit-plus properties, Allison's advantage is less about a single past sale and more about what stands behind her today: the Compass Commercial platform, a dedicated team, and a buyer network built over more than two decades of relationships with family offices, institutional investors, and developers who are actively looking for properties at that scale. She segments that network by acquisition timeline, so when a large building comes to market, outreach starts immediately to buyers who are already positioned to move on it.
Allison does not run her business off cold marketing campaigns. Her listings regularly come from referrals built up over years, and one story from a recent Off Market Podcast interview makes the point well. She was retained to sell a building in Noe Valley that a family had owned for 80 years, and when she asked the owner how he found her, he said three separate people had pointed him her way, a family friend, someone who had received her mailers over the years, and a friend who owned another building she had worked on. That kind of repeat, layered referral pattern only builds up when past clients are satisfied enough to keep mentioning your name.
Her published rankings and press coverage come from MLS data and independent journalism rather than a consumer review platform, so if you are looking for star ratings, you will not find a large public review count tied to her name. What you will find is two decades of repeat clients, family offices, and fellow agents who keep sending business her way, which in a relationship-driven market like San Francisco commercial real estate carries real weight.
Allison's recognition has been earned inside the numbers rather than handed out at an industry banquet. She was named Rookie of the Year at Marcus & Millichap in 2007, the year that set her career in motion. Since then, her recognition has come from being ranked the top listing agent in San Francisco for both 2-4 unit and 5+ unit buildings across multiple consecutive years, verified by MLS-sourced data on both her own site and Compass's corporate agent directory, plus coverage by The Real Deal for the largest multifamily sale in San Francisco in 2022.
Allison has also started coaching other agents through the commercial side of real estate, particularly women trying to break into a segment of the industry that has historically been male-dominated. Rather than building out a large team under her own name, she now partners with residential agents and smaller teams across the Bay Area as their commercial arm, stepping in on pricing, strategy, or a buyer introduction when one of their clients needs to sell a multi-unit property. That role, informal as it is, has put her in front of a wider swath of San Francisco's real estate community than her own transaction list alone would suggest.
The Real Deal covered Allison's listing and sale of 625 Scott Street as standalone news, once when the 42-unit Alamo Square building hit the market at $20 million, calling it the most trophy-like apartment building for sale in the city, and again when it closed at $18,050,000. She was also featured in a full episode of the Off Market Podcast, "From Surfing to $1B in Sales," walking through her career and her approach to building a client base in a market as competitive as San Francisco's.
A few things separate how Allison operates from a typical listing agent:
She covers the full range of San Francisco multi-unit property, from a 2-unit owner-occupied building to complex 5-10 unit investment sales to large multifamily and mixed-use assets, all inside one team, so an owner does not have to shop around for a different specialist as their building size changes.
She runs a proprietary buyer network built over 24 years, segmented by which investors are ready to act now versus in five or ten years, which is why several of her recent deals closed in two to three weeks rather than the standard 30-plus days on market.
She has direct experience with probate, trust, and court-confirmed partition sales, a category that trips up agents unfamiliar with how court overbid processes work, and with 1031 exchanges, where timeline pressure can sink a deal if the agent does not move fast.
She publishes ongoing market data, including monthly multi-unit sales updates and quarterly reports on 5+ unit buildings, so pricing recommendations are grounded in current numbers rather than a general sense of the market.
If you own a multi-unit building anywhere in San Francisco, from a small duplex to a large apartment complex, Allison Chapleau is the top realtor in San Francisco to talk to before you list. Reach her directly at allison@allisonchapleau.com or (415) 516-0648, or visit allisonchapleau.com for current listings, sold properties, and a confidential property valuation.
Allison Chapleau is widely regarded as the top realtor in San Francisco for multi-unit property, based on MLS data showing she has been the number one listing agent in the city for both 2-4 unit and 5+ unit buildings across multiple consecutive years.
Allison Chapleau, a Senior Vice President at Compass Commercial Brokerage, has focused exclusively on San Francisco apartment buildings since 2002 and has closed over $1 billion in multi-unit transactions in that time.
She has worked in San Francisco multi-unit and commercial real estate for more than 24 years, starting at Marcus & Millichap in 2002 before moving through Paragon Commercial Real Estate and Vanguard Properties on her way to Compass.
She handles both. She has been San Francisco's number one listing agent for 2-4 unit buildings and for 5+ unit buildings, so an owner with a duplex gets the same specialized attention as an owner with a large multifamily property.
Her largest documented sale is 625 Scott Street, a 42-unit building across from Alamo Square that sold for $18,050,000 in 2022, which The Real Deal reported as the largest and most expensive multifamily sale in San Francisco that year.
Her track record centers on buildings up to 42 units, but she operates through Compass Commercial's institutional platform and a 24-year buyer network of family offices and developers built for exactly this kind of larger transaction, and her team regularly represents mixed-use and development properties beyond standard apartment sales.
San Francisco's rent control ordinance, mandatory soft story seismic retrofit rules, and narrow 25-by-100-foot lot sizes all affect how a multi-unit building should be priced and marketed, and a generalist agent who mostly sells single-family homes typically has not built the technical knowledge to handle those factors correctly.
Yes. She has built a buyer and investor network over more than two decades that she reaches out to directly when a new listing comes up, which is how several of her recent San Francisco sales closed in two to three weeks instead of sitting on the open market.
She was named Rookie of the Year at Marcus & Millichap in 2007, and her ongoing recognition comes from MLS-verified rankings as the top listing agent in San Francisco for 2-4 unit and 5+ unit buildings, along with coverage from The Real Deal.
Yes, she has direct experience with court-confirmed probate and partition sales, including a development site sale that went through a court overbid process and closed $1.5 million above its list price.
A 5-10 unit sale usually draws investor buyers who scrutinize cap rates and expense ratios more closely than an owner-occupant buyer would for a duplex, but the property is often still small enough to avoid some of the institutional underwriting requirements that come with buildings over 50 units, which is why an agent who works across all three tiers, like Allison Chapleau, can price each type correctly.
She is a Senior Vice President at Compass Commercial Brokerage, working out of Compass's San Francisco office on Van Ness Avenue.
Whether you're considering selling, exploring a 1031 exchange, or simply want to understand where your property stands in today's market, an accurate valuation is the starting point.
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