Median Permit in 94131: $20,000 on 69 Filings — June 2026

Start with the money. In the 30 days ending June 9, ZIP 94131 in San Francisco carried $2.9M of permitted residential work across 69 permits — a quiet, hill-perched corner of the city where the construction is steady but rarely headline-grabbing. This is the Diamond Heights, Glen Park, and Fairmount slope of the city: detached single-family homes, narrow lots, and a lot of careful interior work behind unchanged facades.

That dollar figure is the lead because it tells you what kind of market this is. $2.9M spread over 69 permits is not a teardown-and-rebuild district; it is a remodel district. People here are not adding towers, they are renovating kitchens, reframing bathrooms, replacing decks, and seismically retrofitting homes that have stood on these hills for decades. Every number in this report is a slice of San Francisco's sealed daily permit snapshot — we filtered the citywide feed down to one ZIP and counted.

A building permit is the official record a city creates when it authorizes a specific construction or renovation job at a specific address — the closest thing to a public, timestamped signal that work is about to happen. When you aggregate those records for a single ZIP over a single month, you get a clean read on where residential investment is flowing, who is doing the work, and what kind of jobs dominate. That is the whole point of this report: not a forecast, but a verifiable snapshot of 94131 as San Francisco's own building department recorded it.

Key Findings

• $2.9M in total permitted residential valuation in ZIP 94131 over the window, according to US Tech Automations' sealed permit snapshots.

• 69 permits were filed in the ZIP across the reporting window, per San Francisco Department of Building Inspection via data.sfgov.org (Socrata).

• $20,000 median permit valuation in 94131 — pointing to a market of mid-sized remodels, not new construction, per San Francisco Department of Building Inspection via data.sfgov.org (Socrata).

• OTC Alterations led the ZIP with 65 permits — the dominant job type by a wide margin, per the sealed snapshot.

• Citywide, San Francisco recorded 952 permits worth $68.9M in the same window, the slice 94131 was drawn from.

ZIP 94131 logged 69 permits worth $2.9M in the 30 days ending June 9, 2026, at a $20,000 median — a market built on mid-sized residential remodels, not new builds.

ZIP 94131 Permit Activity, May 11 – June 9, 2026

Here is the headline snapshot for the ZIP. Every figure below is a direct cut of San Francisco's sealed citywide snapshot, narrowed to permits geocoded inside 94131.

The shape of this table matters more than any single cell. A $20,000 median sitting under a $2.9M total across 69 permits describes a tight, mid-market distribution — most jobs cluster in the low five figures, the kind of valuation you see for a bathroom gut, a kitchen reconfiguration, a structural beam, or a code-compliance upgrade. There is no single mega-project dragging the average; this is volume work, dozens of independent households each authorizing a contained job in the same month.

A $20,000 median across 69 permits means the typical 94131 job is a contained residential remodel — not a luxury rebuild and not a quick cosmetic fix.

What Is Getting Built in 94131

The category mix is lopsided, and that is the most useful thing about it. The top permit type in the ZIP was OTC Alterations with 65 permits — meaning nearly the entire month of activity ran through a single channel.

"OTC" stands for over-the-counter: permits a homeowner or contractor can obtain in a single visit (or its online equivalent) without the extended plan-check that larger or structurally significant projects require. In San Francisco's system, OTC alteration permits cover the bread-and-butter of residential renovation — interior remodels, replacing finishes and fixtures, re-roofing, window and door swaps, electrical and plumbing upgrades tied to a remodel, deck and stair repairs, and many seismic and dry-rot fixes that do not change the building's footprint or use.

What triggers one? Almost any job that touches a home's structure, systems, or layout but stays inside the existing envelope. Replacing a kitchen and moving a non-load-bearing wall: OTC alteration. Reframing a bathroom and upgrading the plumbing: OTC alteration. Repairing a hillside deck that has weathered a decade of fog: OTC alteration. The permit exists so the city can verify the work meets code and gets inspected — it is not a sign of distress, it is the normal paperwork of maintaining and improving older housing stock.

That concentration mirrors the city as a whole. Across San Francisco, the same over-the-counter channel dominates the residential mix:

In the ZIP, OTC Alterations alone accounted for 65 of the 69 permits — an even tighter concentration than the citywide picture, where additions, alterations, and larger filings take a bigger slice.

For 94131 specifically, that 65-of-69 concentration paints a clear picture. This is a neighborhood of owner-occupiers improving homes they intend to keep, not investors flipping inventory or developers breaking new ground. The hilly terrain and detached-home pattern of Diamond Heights and Glen Park reward exactly this kind of incremental, interior-and-systems work. When you see a ZIP where OTC alterations swallow the category mix, you are looking at a stable residential area where the building department's main job is signing off on remodels.

How 94131 Compares in San Francisco

94131 is one of several active residential ZIPs in the city. The table below sets it beside other top San Francisco ZIPs from the same sealed snapshot, plus the citywide headline row, so you can see where it sits on permit volume and dollars.

The comparison is where 94131's character sharpens. On permit count it ties 94121 at 69 permits, right in the middle of the city's active ZIPs. But on dollars it sits at the lower end — $2.9M, below ZIPs with fewer permits like 94114 at $7.2M and 94118 at $9.7M. That gap is the story: 94114 and 94118 are pulling far more valuation out of similar-or-fewer permits, which means bigger individual jobs. 94131 is the opposite — lots of moderate remodels, few large ones.

For anyone reading the market, that distinction is actionable. A contractor chasing high-ticket gut renovations would weight toward ZIP 94114 or ZIP 94118 — each has its own breakdown. A contractor running volume on kitchen-and-bath remodels, decks, and seismic work would find 94131 a deep, steady pool. Suppliers stocking mid-market finish materials read the same signal.

The closest peer on volume has its own report at ZIP 94121, and the citywide picture sits in the San Francisco June report.

Methodology

These figures come from San Francisco Department of Building Inspection via data.sfgov.org (Socrata). 94131 is a ZIP-level cut of the same sealed citywide snapshots — we ingest the full San Francisco feed daily, then narrow to permits geocoded inside the ZIP for the window.

All figures are computed directly from US Tech Automations' sealed daily permit snapshots; nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated.

Scope matters: this report 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. If a job is a standalone electrical or plumbing sub-permit, or a commercial filing, it is not in these counts — by design, so the residential signal stays clean.

This edition is cross-sectional. It reports one window, May 11 – June 9, 2026, and makes no claim about trend, direction, or change over time. We do not yet hold enough sealed months in 94131 to say whether activity is rising or falling, so we do not say it.

How the data gets from the city to this page:

1. Collect. Pull San Francisco's residential permit feed from the DBI Socrata endpoint each day, capturing new and updated records.

2. Normalize. Standardize addresses, geocode to ZIP, classify each permit by category, and attach the valuation the filing reports.

3. Seal daily. Hash and store each day's snapshot append-only, so the record for any past day cannot be quietly altered.

4. Aggregate. Sum permits and valuations for ZIP 94131 across the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window to produce the figures above.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Does $2.9M of permitted work mean $2.9M was actually spent in 94131?
A: Not exactly. $2.9M is the total of the valuations declared on the 69 permits filed in the window. Declared valuation is the contractor or owner estimate the city records — it is the best public proxy for job size, but it reflects authorized work, not verified spend or completed construction.

Q: Is this every construction permit in 94131?
A: No. This covers residential building permits — single-family and small multi-family. Commercial and standalone sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest, so the count is a clean residential signal, not a total of all permits issued in the ZIP.

Q: Why is the median permit valuation only $20,000 when the total is $2.9M?
A: Because 94131 is a remodel market. A $20,000 median across 69 permits means most jobs are mid-sized renovations — kitchens, baths, decks, seismic and code work — rather than a few giant rebuilds. The total adds up from many moderate jobs, not a handful of large ones.

Q: What does an OTC Alterations permit actually cover?
A: OTC means over-the-counter — permits issued without extended plan-check. They cover interior remodels, re-roofing, window and door replacement, deck and stair repair, and remodel-tied electrical and plumbing work that stays inside the existing building. With 65 of the ZIP's 69 permits, OTC alterations are 94131's dominant job type.

Q: Who actually pulls these permits?
A: Mostly licensed general contractors and specialty trades working on behalf of owner-occupiers, with some owners pulling their own. In a neighborhood like 94131 — detached homes, hillside lots, long-term residents — the typical filer is a contractor handling a remodel for a household that plans to stay.

Q: How current is this snapshot?
A: It covers the 30 days ending June 9, 2026, and is sealed — the underlying daily snapshots are hashed and stored append-only. We report this window only and make no comparison to past months, because we do not yet hold enough sealed history in this ZIP to claim a trend.

Put Permit Data to Work

A single ZIP's permit feed is a working signal for several jobs, not just a curiosity. A remodeling contractor reads 94131's 65 OTC alteration permits as a live map of nearby households already committed to work — and as a place to time a neighborhood-specific pitch. A finish-materials supplier reads the $20,000 median as a demand signal for mid-market inventory. A real estate agent reads pre-listing renovation activity as an early read on which homes may come to market. A lender reads concentrated remodel permits as a renovation-financing opportunity.

The hard part is that this signal arrives daily, scattered across a public feed, and goes stale fast. US Tech Automations builds automations that monitor permit feeds like San Francisco's, route new filings to the right person, and draft the outreach so the work happens in minutes instead of being skipped. The same sealed-snapshot discipline behind this report — collect, normalize, seal, aggregate — is what makes the underlying permits data trustworthy enough to act on. You can trace how predictions are scored in the permit prediction ledger, or compare with a denser ZIP like 94112.

If you want permit signals turned into a workflow your team actually runs, that monitoring and routing layer is what we build: see how it works for real estate teams.

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