OTC Alterations Dominates 94109, San Francisco

If you pull permits or list homes for a living and you are weighing whether ZIP 94109 deserves a place on your route, this post is the short answer: yes for renovation work, no if you are hunting volume. Over the May 11 – June 9, 2026 reporting window, this slice of San Francisco sealed 15 residential building permits worth $5.3M, led by a single permit type — the OTC Alterations category. That mix is what your week here would look like.

Hold the headline up to the light first. Fifteen permits is a low count, yet the declared value runs to $5.3M and the median job is $20,000 — a combination that tells a working professional more than the raw total does. A low permit count paired with a high dollar figure means a handful of larger jobs are pulling the total well above what the typical permit would suggest. Every figure on this page is a slice of San Francisco's sealed daily snapshot for the same window.

Scope: residential building permits (single-family and small multi-family); commercial and sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest. This is not a count of all construction permits issued in each city. A building permit is the jurisdiction's written authorization to do a defined piece of construction or alteration, and a sealed snapshot is a daily, hashed, append-only record of what the permit feed published that day — fixed at capture so the figure cannot be quietly revised later.

The 94109 Read in a Single Pass

For the contractor or agent who wants the whole answer before the tables: 94109 is a small-count, higher-value residential permit market where over-the-counter alteration work dominates, and the gap between its low permit count and its $5.3M declared total is the detail worth acting on. Everything below is cross-sectional — one 30-day window described on its own terms, with no comparison to past periods, because the sealed history needed for trend claims does not yet exist.

• ZIP 94109 sealed 15 residential building permits in the window, according to the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection via data.sfgov.org (Socrata).

• Declared valuation for the ZIP totals $5.3M for the window, per the same sealed daily permit snapshots.

• The median permit in 94109 is valued at $20,000, according to the Department of Building Inspection feed.

• OTC Alterations covers 12 of the ZIP's 15 permits, per the sealed daily permit snapshots.

• Citywide, San Francisco sealed 952 residential permits worth $68.9M, per the sealed daily permit snapshots.

The ZIP's window totals at a glance, before the cross-ZIP comparison:

Where 94109 Lands Among San Francisco's Permit ZIPs

Start with the comparison, because for a practitioner the only useful way to read one ZIP is against its neighbors measured the same way over the same window. The table below ranks San Francisco's busier residential permit ZIPs by permit count, with 94109 in its place and the citywide line for reference. Total valuation is shown in compact form; an em dash marks a figure this slice does not break out.

The narrative hangs off where 94109 sits and where it does not. By count it is one of the quietest ZIPs in the table — 94122 records 99 permits, 94116 records 95, and 94110 records 84, each clearing many times 94109's 15. A contractor chasing sheer job frequency would put those Sunset and Mission ZIPs ahead of this one. So far the count says skip it.

ZIP 94109 sealed 15 residential building permits worth $5.3M in the window, against a citywide 952 permits worth $68.9M.

Now read the value column instead of the count column, and the verdict flips. With only 15 permits, 94109 still posts a $5.3M total — heavier than 94131 ($2.9M) and 94110 ($3.5M), each of which logs four to five times its permit count. That is the signature of a market where the dollars per job run high: a few sizeable projects are doing the lifting. The $20,000 median, sitting just above the citywide $19,395, confirms the typical job is a normal alteration while the total is stretched by the larger ones above it.

San Francisco ranks #2 among the 8 metros by permit count and #5 by total declared valuation this edition, per the cross-metro snapshot. Within that city, 94109 is a low-volume but value-dense tile — the opposite trade-off from a high-count Sunset ZIP. You can see the citywide picture in the San Francisco building permit report, which sits over this same sealed snapshot, and a lower-value corner reads very differently in this Bayview-Hunters Point ZIP report.

What That OTC Alterations Count Actually Means

With the comparison set, the dominant work type is what tells a tradesperson how to plan. The leading permit category in ZIP 94109 is the otc alterations permit category, which the city labels OTC Alterations, and it covers 12 of the ZIP's 15 permits in the window.

"OTC" stands for over-the-counter: a streamlined San Francisco permit issued the same day a homeowner or contractor files with the Department of Building Inspection, without the plan-check cycle a larger ground-up project requires. It is the permit you pull for interior alteration work that does not substantially change a building's structure or footprint — replacing a kitchen, reworking a bathroom, upgrading electrical or plumbing, finishing or reconfiguring interior space, or swapping in new windows, a furnace, or a water heater.

That OTC Alterations accounts for 12 of 94109's 15 permits is the defining fact of the neighborhood. This is dense Nob Hill and Russian Hill housing being maintained and modernized in place — apartments and flats getting reworked, not lots being cleared for new construction. The jobs behind these permits are the kind a single crew completes in days or weeks, which is precisely what an over-the-counter filing is built to allow.

OTC Alterations covers 12 of ZIP 94109's 15 permits — over-the-counter alteration and repair work, not ground-up construction.

For anyone reading the neighborhood as a market, two things are true at once, and they shape different playbooks. The dominant work is renovation-scale and frequent — remodel contractors, electricians, plumbers, window and HVAC installers, and the suppliers who serve them all have a steady, if low-volume, opportunity here. But the $5.3M total against a $20,000 median says some of these jobs are substantially larger than the typical line, so the few high-value permits in the set are worth chasing on their own.

The same OTC Alterations category dominates San Francisco citywide, so 94109 is running the city's pattern at a smaller, higher-value scale. A practitioner can compare how that mix plays out in a comparable San Francisco neighborhood through this Potrero Hill ZIP report.

How These Figures Are Produced

Source: San Francisco Department of Building Inspection via data.sfgov.org (Socrata). All figures are computed directly from US Tech Automations' sealed daily permit snapshots; nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated.

Every number on this page is a ZIP-level cut of the same sealed citywide snapshot the metro report draws on. We do not pull a separate 94109 feed; we filter the sealed San Francisco records to permits in this ZIP, over the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window, and read the counts, the declared values, and the category label straight off those records. Because the window is one 30-day slice and the sealed history needed for trend claims does not yet exist, this report is strictly cross-sectional — no month-over-month or year-over-year framing of any kind.

The pipeline behind every figure runs in four steps:

1. Collect. Pull San Francisco's residential permit feed from the Department of Building Inspection dataset on data.sfgov.org via Socrata, every day.

2. Normalize. Map each record to a common schema — permit identifier, issue date, ZIP, declared valuation, category label — and exclude commercial and sub-trade permit types at ingest.

3. Seal daily. Hash each day's normalized snapshot and append it to a content-addressed store, so no figure can be silently revised after capture.

4. Slice and aggregate. Filter the sealed San Francisco snapshots to ZIP 94109 and compute the window counts, total, and median directly — no interpolation, no modeling.

That sealing discipline is the same one behind our permit prediction ledger, where forecasts are committed to the record before any outcome is observable. Sealing first and publishing second is the whole point: these ZIP figures were fixed at capture, so a contractor or agent can hold the numbers to account.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many building permits did ZIP 94109 record in the latest window?
A: 15 residential building permits between May 11 – June 9, 2026, according to San Francisco Department of Building Inspection data published via data.sfgov.org (Socrata) and captured in sealed daily snapshots. The figure covers single-family and small multi-family work only, read as a slice of the citywide sealed snapshot rather than from a separate ZIP feed.

Q: Is this every construction permit pulled in 94109?
A: No. The dataset covers residential building permits (single-family and small multi-family); commercial and sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest. This is not a count of all construction permits issued in each city, so the 15-permit figure should not be set against broader citywide permit totals from other sources.

Q: Why is the total $5.3M so high for only 15 permits?
A: Because the dollars per job here run high. A $5.3M total across 15 permits, with a $20,000 median, means the typical job is a normal alteration while a few larger projects pull the total well above the count alone. That spread — low volume, heavier value — is the most actionable thing about 94109 for anyone planning where to work.

Q: What does an OTC Alterations permit actually cover?
A: OTC is San Francisco's over-the-counter permit — issued without the full plan-check cycle for interior alterations that do not substantially change a building's structure or footprint. Think kitchen and bath remodels, electrical or plumbing upgrades, window or furnace swaps, and interior reconfiguration. It is the workhorse permit for maintaining and modernizing existing homes, and it covers 12 of this ZIP's 15 permits.

Q: How does 94109 compare to other San Francisco ZIPs?
A: By count it is among the quietest — busier ZIPs like 94122 (99 permits), 94116 (95), and 94110 (84) each run several times its 15 permits. By value it punches up: its $5.3M total beats higher-count ZIPs such as 94131 ($2.9M). Citywide, San Francisco sealed 952 permits worth $68.9M at a $19,395 median this window.

Q: Who pulls these permits in a neighborhood like this?
A: Homeowners, building owners, and the remodel crews working for them. The OTC Alterations mix and the $20,000 median point to renovation-scale work — remodelers, electricians, plumbers, window and HVAC installers — with a few larger projects mixed in. That is the demand profile a contractor or supplier would plan around in 94109.

Putting 94109 on Your Route

Permit data at this resolution earns its keep for the people who act on it the week it lands. A remodel contractor uses a ZIP-level read like 94109 to decide whether a low-volume, value-dense neighborhood justifies marketing spend before committing it. Building-product suppliers time inventory and outreach to homes that have just been permitted. Real estate agents read fresh alteration permits as pre-listing signals, since a renovated home is often a home headed to market. Lenders treat declared valuations as a ground-truth measure of where money is actually going into housing.

US Tech Automations turns these permit signals into automated workflows: monitoring new permits as they post to jurisdiction feeds, routing qualified records to the right territory or rep, and drafting outreach grounded in sealed, verifiable data rather than scraped guesswork. For a ZIP like 94109, the payoff is catching every one of those few-but-larger jobs the day it appears, rather than missing the high-value permit that made the trip worthwhile — without a working pro having to refresh a public portal by hand.

You can explore the underlying permit corpus at permits.ustechautomations.com, see how a busier corner of the city reads in our San Francisco metro permit report, and check the sealing record in the permit prediction ledger. When you are ready to put a market on autopilot, US Tech Automations builds the monitoring and lead-routing layer for real estate teams at /ai-agents/real-estate.

Source: US Tech Automations Research — computed from sealed daily permit snapshots, May 11 – June 9, 2026.