Top San Francisco Probate Realtor Allison Chapleau Represents Executors Through Court-Confirmed Sales as State’s New $750,000 Probate Threshold Falls Short in San Francisco
San Francisco, California – September 13, 2026 – Allison Chapleau, Senior Vice President at Compass Commercial Brokerage, a specialist in court-supervised probate, trust and partition sales in San Francisco, and one of San Francisco’s leading probrate real estate agents, continues to represent executors and trustees through court-confirmed estate sales as California’s new $750,000 probate threshold proves largely unavailable in the city. The threshold, created by Assembly Bill 2016 and effective April 1, 2025, sits below the median sale price of a San Francisco home. Most estates in the city that hold real property remain subject to full probate administration and court confirmation.
AB 2016 raised California’s small estate affidavit limit from $184,500 to $208,850 and created a simplified transfer, the Petition to Determine Succession to Real Property, for a decedent’s primary residence valued at up to $750,000. The change was written to keep modest family homes out of formal probate. In San Francisco County, the median sale price was $1,500,599 in July 2026 according to Redfin, roughly twice the ceiling. The median single family home sale price in the city was $2,150,000 in April 2026 as reported by market publication theFrontSteps, nearly three times the ceiling.
San Francisco estates above the threshold remain subject to the standard sequence: appointment of a personal representative, valuation by a court-appointed probate referee, and, where the representative holds limited authority, a confirmation hearing at which the accepted offer is open to overbidding. Under California Probate Code section 10309, the sale price must reach at least 90 percent of the referee’s appraised value. The opening overbid must exceed the accepted offer by 10 percent of the first $10,000 plus 5 percent of the remainder.
Court-confirmed probate closings handled by Chapleau’s practice reflect the same pattern. A probate sale in the Outer Mission district closed in March 2025, weeks before AB 2016 took effect, at $1,305,000, which was $355,000 above the list price, following competitive bidding at the confirmation hearing. A second probate sale closed in May 2026, more than a year after the new rules took effect, at $950,000. Both exceeded the $750,000 ceiling, and both required court confirmation and the overbid process.
“What the overbid rewards is the marketing that happens before the hearing,” said a local probate attorney. “An executor or trustee has a duty to maximize what the estate returns to its beneficiaries, and on a court-confirmed sale that duty is discharged in how the property is exposed to the market, not on the day of the hearing.”
A further complication in San Francisco is the composition of estate-held property. A substantial share of the city’s inherited real estate consists of two to four unit, five or more unit, rent-controlled and mixed-use buildings, which require income-based valuation capable of withstanding scrutiny at confirmation. Chapleau has worked in San Francisco multi-unit and commercial real estate for more than 24 years and has sold more than 300 apartment, mixed-use and commercial buildings, closing over $1 billion in multi-unit transactions. MLS data records her as the leading listing agent in San Francisco for two to four unit buildings from 2021 through 2025, with 78 listings compared with 36 for the second-ranked agent, and for buildings of five or more units from 2021 through 2026, with 115 listings compared with 92. She has handled more than 40 probate, trust and partition sales across all 10 San Francisco districts, and a San Francisco court has appointed her to serve as Partition Referee.
Chapleau’s practice represents executors, trustees, referees and private professional fiduciaries across all 10 San Francisco districts. Executors, trustees and estate attorneys seeking a probate Realtor in San Francisco can review her court-supervised sales practice for detail on timelines, valuation and the confirmation process.
About Allison Chapleau Real Estate, A Top Choice for Probate Sales in San Francisco
Allison Chapleau is a Senior Vice President at Compass Commercial Brokerage in San Francisco, specializing in multi-unit, mixed-use and commercial property. She has worked in San Francisco real estate since 2002 and represents executors, trustees, referees and private professional fiduciaries in court-supervised probate, trust and partition sales across the city’s 10 districts. Her practice is built on income-based valuation that can be defended in court and on marketing that produces competitive bidding for estates and their beneficiaries.
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