A social purpose real estate brokerage serving the Bay Area.

Grown out of a land trust, built for the movement

Common Good Real Estate started as an answer to a problem the San Francisco Community Land Trust knew intimately: too few brokers understood social purpose real estate, ground leases, community ownership, and mission-driven underwriting. Rather than keep translating for brokers who treated each deal as just a transaction, SFCLT built that expertise in-house, then opened it up to the wider community of organizations facing the same gap.

We’re not a commercial brokerage with a nonprofit page bolted on. We’re a land trust that happens to hold a brokerage license, working for organizations that share our basic premise: land and space held for community benefit is key to strengthening communities.

Every transaction funds the mission

Proceeds from our transactions go directly toward SFCLT’s mission of creating more community-owned, permanently affordable housing in San Francisco. When we represent a food bank buying its warehouse, or a sister land trust acquiring its next parcel, that engagement also helps fund SFCLT’s next unit of affordable housing. 

What we bring to the table

  • Practitioner-level fluency in social purpose real estate. Ground leases, capital stacks, CDFI underwriting, PRIs, NMTCs. We speak this fluently because we live in it, not because we took a class on it.

  • Relationships across the Bay Area’s community real estate ecosystem: CDFI lenders, other land trusts, affordable housers, technical assistance providers, and the networks that support nonprofit facility projects.

  • A stake in power and wealth building, not just closing deals. Every acquisition is a step toward an organization and communities owning their future.

  • A land trust’s patience. These deals sometimes move slower than market-rate transactions, and we built our process around that instead of fighting it. Our experience helps us to understand where barriers might occur, and take proactive steps to avoid unnecessary stress or tension in the transaction.  

Our Team

Kristen Villalobos

Kristen has held a California Real Estate license since 2014 and a California Broker license since 2024.

The foundation for this work was built over two decades, beginning with a career in affordable housing compliance, overseeing a portfolio of LIHTC properties spanning the West Coast and Alaska. In 2017, she joined the fight to reverse displacement in the Bay Area as a Sales Agent with IMPACT, representing nonprofit affordable housing providers in the purchase of 24 buildings, leading to the stabilization of 260 households.

Kristen joined the SFCLT staff as Acquisitions Director in 2023 and built the in-house Brokerage in 2024. Today, she brings her transactional and property analysis expertise to a growing roster of community land trusts and nonprofit housing partners across the Bay Area — structuring acquisitions, and building the organizational capacity her clients need to preserve permanently affordable housing at scale.

Calif. DRE No. 01942209

Acquisitions Director & Broker