Darcy Padilla for The New York Times ROUGHLY two decades ago, during an earlier Internet start-up boom, many entrepreneurs and fast-typing coders and engineers set up shop in a still-gritty area of this city: South of Market Street. The young … Continue reading →
Social Media Boom Fuels San Francisco’s Rental and Home Sales Market
Hard on the heels of my last post that covered sky-rocketing home prices and rents comes yesterday’s front-page New York Times article on how San Francisco is at the epicenter of the new social networking/media boom.
San Francisco Housing and Rental Markets: Choose a Rock or a Hard Place
The San Francisco Association of Realtors, of which I am a member, just came out with its Market_Focus_Report for May_2012 (click to open). If you’re a seller or landlord, the news is great: home prices and rents are up, up, up. Not so good if you’re on the other side of the deal.
Case Shiller Chimes in With Good News: US Down only 17%!
Case-Shiller published its closely watched indices yesterday. Hooray! The broadest CS index shows that the rate of decline in the nation’s largest housing markets has reversed in recent months. Now we’re only going down 16% year over year instead of 20%.
They also point out that we are now back to 2003 values, which also holds true of San Francisco. Here’s my chart from an April blog:
Before you go out and celebrate, Case-Shiller has “San Francisco” down a whopping 26.1% year over year. Why the quotes? Because it’s really the “San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area” and it includes ALL of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Mateo, and … San Francisco County. That’s 5 counties folks, a factoid often omitted even by such august publications as the New York Times (see today’s front page article). ...