In a sign of weak demand for restaurants overall, the once highly valued "full" liquor licenses in San Francisco, which could only be obtained on the secondary market due to a longstanding legal exception, are now worth about a third of what they were before the pandemic.

You might not think that the market price for a liquor license would fluctuate, or that the price could tank in a matter of just a few years. It's not like people have stopped drinking — Gen Z maybe has — and it's not like the local restaurant scene is in the doldrums like it was in 2021.

But as the Chronicle reports, much like BART ridership, things have rebounded in the liquor license market since the dark days of the pandemic, they just have not rebounded back to where they were, by a long shot.

The coveted Type 47 liquor licenses, which once traded hands in San Franciscofor $250,000 or more, are now valued at around $100,000, the Chronicle explains. That's still far more than the $20,000 that the same license would cost in other parts of California. But it marks a serious decline in value that is being driven by a decline in demand.

"The price of a liquor license is an index of what people believe about San Francisco and the restaurant industry," says Thad Vogler, formerly the owner of Bar Agricole, Trou Normand, and two other bars, all of which had licenses he'd paid a quarter million dollars for, speaking to the Chronicle. "They’ve stayed down. They’re not going up."

A broker who has traded in SF Type 47 liquor licenses for years, Cameron DeRuosi, confirms this to the Chronicle, saying that the rock-bottom price of $95,000 in late 2025, but has come up slightly since then.

And, DuRuosi adds in speaking to the Chronicle that such slumps in the price of licenses usually presage a larger recession on the way.

The reason that liquor licenses ever climbed to $250K or higher is because of the unique position San Francisco has in the state's liquor license economy. The number of licenses in a given jurisdiction was capped back in 1939 at one for every 2,000 residents, but when that rule was set, San Francisco already had around 1,000 bars and restaurants serving booze, so they were all granted licenses rather than be forced to shut down, and ever sense, no new licenses have been issued except under a recent state program to help under-represented or struggling neighborhoods.

The Chronicle pegs the current number of Type 47 licenses in SF at 741 — these licenses are geared toward restaurants, but many bars that hold them serve food as a requirement for serving booze. The state ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Control agency) says that there are between 202 and 210 active Type 48 licenses in the city as well, and those are "On Sale - General" licenses for bars with no food requirement.

Whenever a restaurant closes, that license becomes an asset the owner can then sell. But with a glut of these coming available in the last couple of years, the price just ticked downward as the pace of new openings has not kept up, and demand went soft.

DuRuosi tells the Chronicle that just three years ago, in 2023, you still couldn't buy a Type 47 license for less than $230,000, so the price trajectory actually began in the pandemic hangover and not during the height of the pandemic itself.

Ironically, this past fall and winter, as these licenses hit their lowest price point in decades, the city was feeling like it was in a sudden restaurant renaissance, with a spate of splashy openings, like Via Aurelia in Mission Bay, Wolfsbane in Dogpatch, and Michael Mina's revamped Bourbon Steak at the St. Francis.

We'll have to wait and see what this year brings.

Previously: Lurie Gets His 20 New Liquor Licenses for Union Square, After Newsom Signs Bill Allowing These

Photo by Declan Sun