Median Permit in 94121: $15,000 on 69 Filings — June 2026

In the Outer Richmond, one permit type does almost all the talking. Across ZIP 94121 in San Francisco, OTC Alterations accounted for 65 of the 69 residential building permits captured in the sealed snapshot for May 11 – June 9, 2026. That is not a market doing teardowns and ground-up builds. It is a market quietly reworking the homes it already has, one over-the-counter filing at a time.

Every figure on this page is a ZIP-level slice of San Francisco's metro snapshot — a sealed, daily record of residential permit filings, cut down to the 94121 boundary. The headline is the concentration: when nearly every permit in a neighborhood shares one category, the work is legible.

You know what the contractors are doing, you know which suppliers matter, and you know what the renovation pipeline looks like before a single sign goes up on a lawn. This report walks through that 94121 picture, sets it beside the rest of San Francisco, and explains what an "OTC Alterations" permit actually covers.

This is residential data only. The snapshot 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. A building permit is a municipal authorization to perform construction or alteration work that meets code, filed and recorded before the work begins.

Key Findings

• ZIP 94121 recorded 69 residential permits in the window, sourced from the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection via data.sfgov.org (Socrata).

• OTC Alterations led with 65 permits, the dominant category in 94121, sourced from the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection via data.sfgov.org (Socrata).

• Total sealed valuation in 94121 reached $3.9M for the window, sourced from the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection via data.sfgov.org (Socrata).

• The median permit valuation in 94121 was $15,000, sourced from the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection via data.sfgov.org (Socrata).

• San Francisco logged 952 residential permits citywide, ranking #2 across the eight tracked metros, sourced from the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection via data.sfgov.org (Socrata).

In 94121, 65 of 69 sealed residential permits were OTC Alterations work — the most concentrated single-category neighborhood in this San Francisco snapshot.

ZIP 94121 Permit Activity, May 11 – June 9, 2026

The 94121 slice is small in count and modest in dollars, which is exactly what a stable, owner-occupied residential pocket looks like in permit data. Sixty-nine filings over a 30-day window is steady background renovation, not a development wave.

The median tells the real story here. A median permit valuation of $15,000 means half of 94121's filings came in below that line — small, code-driven jobs rather than gut renovations. When the median sits low but the neighborhood still produces a few million dollars in total valuation, the distribution is front-loaded with many modest projects and carried at the top by a handful of larger ones.

What Is Getting Built in 94121

The dominant category in 94121 is recorded in the source as otc alterations permit, which the snapshot presents as OTC Alterations. "OTC" stands for over-the-counter: a permit a homeowner or contractor can obtain in a single counter visit (or its online equivalent) because the work is routine enough not to require extended plan review. In San Francisco, this is the workhorse permit for interior and minor exterior alteration work.

What actually sits behind 65 OTC Alterations filings in a neighborhood like the Outer Richmond? Kitchen and bathroom remodels. Window and door replacement. Re-roofing and dry-rot repair — a perennial reality in San Francisco's fog belt. Electrical and plumbing upgrades tied to a remodel. Adding or reconfiguring interior walls. Voluntary seismic retrofits on older wood-frame homes. None of it changes a building's footprint or use; all of it requires a permit so the work is inspected and brought to code.

An OTC Alterations permit covers routine remodel and repair work — kitchens, baths, windows, roofing, retrofits — that does not need extended plan review.

That concentration is a signal, not noise. When 65 of 69 permits in a ZIP share one category, the trades working that ZIP are predictable: remodel contractors, roofers, window installers, and the electricians and plumbers who follow them. OTC Alterations accounting for 65 of 94121's 69 permits tells a supplier exactly which inventory moves here and tells an agent that the housing stock is being maintained and upgraded rather than turned over.

The few permits outside that category — the difference between 69 and the OTC count — are the larger or more complex jobs that trip into plan review or a different filing type. Those are the projects pulling the total valuation up toward $3.9M even as the median stays grounded at $15,000.

The Outer Richmond's housing stock helps explain the pattern. It is a neighborhood of established single-family and small multi-family homes, many of them decades old, on a regular street grid near the coast. Stock like that generates a steady drumbeat of maintenance-and-improvement work rather than speculative redevelopment: roofs reach the end of their life, kitchens and baths get updated for resale or comfort, salt air and fog accelerate exterior wear.

Each of those jobs is, in permit terms, an OTC alteration. The category does not dominate by accident — it dominates because that is the kind of work an intact, owner-held neighborhood produces.

For the trades, that predictability is the whole point. A remodel contractor reading 65 OTC Alterations filings does not have to guess what the next job looks like; the category itself narrows the field to interior and light-exterior work. A roofer can infer that re-roofing and dry-rot repair are part of that 65. A window installer can read replacement demand straight off the same line. The concentration turns a list of permits into a near-map of who is working in 94121 and what they are installing.

How 94121 Compares in San Francisco

San Francisco's residential permit activity is spread across many neighborhoods, none of them overwhelmingly dominant. Set 94121 against the city's other active ZIPs and the metro line, and its profile is mid-pack on volume with a comparatively low valuation total — consistent with a neighborhood doing a high share of smaller, OTC-style work.

Read across the rows and the dollar-per-permit spread jumps out. 94121 and 94131 both logged 69 permits, yet 94121's total reached $3.9M against 94131's $2.9M — same count, different mix of job sizes. At the other end, 94118 produced $9.7M from just 63 permits and 94114 produced $7.2M from 63 — fewer filings carrying much heavier valuations, the mark of pricier, larger-scope renovations. 94121 sits in the middle: ordinary volume, ordinary dollars, heavily weighted toward routine alteration work.

94121 and 94131 each logged 69 permits, but 94121 reached $3.9M in valuation versus 94131's $2.9M — same count, different job mix.

Against the city total of 952 permits and $68.9M, no single ZIP is the whole story. The neighborhoods that drive San Francisco's valuation are the high-dollar pockets like 94118 and 94114; the neighborhoods that drive its steady permit count are the broad residential ZIPs like 94122 and 94116. 94121 contributes to the count column more than the dollar column. For sibling neighborhood detail, see the 94112 report and the 94131 report.

Citywide, the valuation distribution underscores how typical 94121's $15,000 median is. Across San Francisco the metro median valuation sits at $19,395, with the middle of the distribution running from a P25 of $8,700 to a P75 of $48,018 — meaning a quarter of the city's permits are valued below $8,700 and a quarter above $48,018. A single $6,000,000 filing marks the top of the range.

94121's median lands inside that interquartile band, on the lower side, which is exactly what you expect from a ZIP whose filings are dominated by routine OTC work rather than the heavy renovations that push toward the P75 and beyond.

San Francisco's permit valuations run from a P25 of $8,700 to a P75 of $48,018, around a citywide median of $19,395 — and 94121 sits on the lower side of that band.

The reason the comparison holds up is coverage. San Francisco's snapshot reports 100% valuation coverage across all 952 permits, so the dollar figures are not a partial sample dragged down or up by missing records. When every permit carries a valuation, a low neighborhood median is a real statement about job size, not an artifact of incomplete data — and 94121's $15,000 median is a real statement that its work runs small and frequent.

Methodology

The figures here come from the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection via data.sfgov.org (Socrata), filtered to residential permits and sliced to the 94121 boundary. All figures are computed directly from US Tech Automations' sealed daily permit snapshots; nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated.

The ZIP numbers are a cut of the same San Francisco metro snapshot that produced the citywide totals — 952 permits at 100% valuation coverage. 94121's 69 permits and $3.9M are that snapshot, narrowed to one ZIP. This edition is cross-sectional: it describes one sealed 30-day window and makes no claim about change over time.

Here is how US Tech Automations builds each snapshot:

1. Collect. Pull residential permit filings daily from the San Francisco DBI Socrata endpoint, capturing category, valuation, and location.

2. Normalize. Standardize category labels and valuations, drop commercial and sub-trade records at ingest, and tag each record to its ZIP.

3. Seal. Content-hash the day's records into an append-only snapshot so the figures cannot be silently revised later.

4. Aggregate. Sum and rank the sealed records across the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window to produce the metro and ZIP rollups shown here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is this every construction permit issued in 94121?
A: No. The snapshot covers residential building permits — single-family and small multi-family — and excludes commercial and sub-trade permits at ingest. The 69 permits shown are residential filings only, not a count of all construction activity in the ZIP.

Q: Why is the 94121 median valuation only $15,000?
A: Because most of the ZIP's 69 permits are small, routine OTC Alterations jobs — remodels, repairs, and upgrades — rather than large renovations. A $15,000 median means half the filings came in below that figure, with a few larger projects lifting the $3.9M total.

Q: What is an OTC Alterations permit?
A: It is an over-the-counter alteration permit — recorded in the source as otc alterations permit — for routine remodel and repair work that does not require extended plan review. Think kitchens, baths, windows, roofing, and seismic retrofits. In 94121 it accounted for 65 of 69 permits.

Q: How does 94121 compare to the rest of San Francisco?
A: 94121's 69 permits put it mid-pack among the city's active ZIPs, below high-volume areas like 94122 at 99 permits, and below high-dollar areas like 94118 at $9.7M. Citywide, San Francisco logged 952 permits worth $68.9M.

Q: Who actually uses this ZIP-level permit data?
A: Remodel contractors gauging where 94121 work is concentrated, suppliers timing roofing and window inventory, lenders reading renovation demand, and agents reading pre-listing signals. The single-category concentration makes 94121 unusually easy to plan around.

Put Permit Data to Work

The reason 94121's profile matters is that permits are a forward signal. A homeowner who pulls an OTC Alterations permit is spending money on the property now — and is often a remodel lead, a supply order, or a future listing in the making. With 65 of 69 permits in one category, the people working this ZIP know precisely which signal to watch.

Contractors use a feed like this to qualify neighborhoods before they market into them. Suppliers use it to time inventory against where the alteration work is clustering. Lenders read renovation demand off the valuation distribution. Agents treat a fresh permit as a pre-listing tell. The raw data is public on the San Francisco permits portal; the value is in monitoring it continuously and routing the right record to the right person fast.

That is where US Tech Automations comes in. We turn sealed permit snapshots into automated workflows — daily monitoring of a ZIP or category, lead routing the moment a qualifying permit lands, and outreach drafting that references the real filing. The same discipline that produced this 94121 report runs the live signal. To see how those signals become a workflow, explore our real estate AI agents.

For the citywide picture, read the San Francisco June report; for how we keep ourselves honest, see the permit prediction ledger.

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