91–100 of 352 posts
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Yet $1600 is still absurdly high for such a simple living space.
It is. Keep in mind this was more shorter term (3-4 months) rental of a fully furnished room. If it was a long-term lease of just an empty room it would be closer to $1300.
Strange concluding sentence about the prospect of an influx of Chinese investors to rekindle rising rents. Is there evidence that such a trend is likely in the near future? I have seen reports that a lot of money is expatriated from China into real estate because it's easy to launder that way. In general is it expected to increase so much that it would have a noticeable impact on rents in the major markets?
I don't know about rents, but overseas investment certainly drive up price to own in Auckland NZ and Vancouver, Canada, though the latter may have stopped due to changing tax policies. Auckland is as big as SF.
If you're investing in property overseas you want the value to be stable or increasing, though. I don't think these people are value investors who would jump into a market with declining prices because the houses were suddenly underpriced -- quite the opposite, I think some would rush to get out in that case.
Zumper is pretty inaccurate when it comes to SF I have found. The influx of new residents still vastly outpaces new construction + people leaving SF. As such, rents are not going down. The easiest way to verify this is just to ask anyone trying to rent in SF.
Rents are going down. I am moving this weekend, and in the 2 months I've been looking a bit, it's very, very obvious. At first, it was just that you no longer had to essentially arrive with 3 months of rent in hand and sign on the spot. Next, there was emphasis on how "this is the only property at X price" (which was false on it's face). When we finally signed, the leasing agent told us "if the price is too high, mak…
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Speculation that this is the case in SF, but is an effect I've seen: You can get a dip in average rent without (sufficiently) dropping bottom quartile rents, which is what NIMBYism tends to block, by having a lot of nice condos built. The top quartile of rents dips heavily as places jockey for condo buyers, everyone moves in to a nicer place as the wave spreads, but the price at the bottom remains (mostly) the same (…
This is not entirely accurate. If the median rent drops, this means necessarily that the rent for at least some portion of the renters below the 50th percentile has dropped. So while it is possible that the very bottom hasn't changed much, the middle/top of bottom necessarily has.
A quartile is 25%, or a quarter, if you didn't know.
My concern was for bottom quartile rents, since the bottom 20% of society is largely concentrated on the low end of that quartile, and they're largely the ones who actually suffer from high housing costs (as opposed to merely having fewer luxuries).
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Its the land not the apartment which is expensive. Land, especially in cities, is finite. This makes it different to other mass produced products
So build up. Here in London people don't build up, for some reason (I mean other than office spaces, obviously). I think it's this nefarious british mentality that old is good. So you never demolish any 2 story buildings, you just build more outwards. Then you complain that the prices are insane.
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Luxury highrise condos and apartments have been showing weakness all year due to oversupply. Deeded land single detached homes (where the strongest coalitions of SF NIMBY lobbies reside) are still very supply constrained and are still very strong wrt price. This is the source of the discrepancy you're talking about. Source: friend who's been in Bay Area real estate for over a decade.
"Oversupply" at $3000+/mo, haha. We can start talking about oversupply when they're more like $700.
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I agree that laws passed to deal with high housing costs are often counterproductive in the long run. The classic example is rent control. Can you explain your theory that low rates drive high rent inflation? Seems like it would be the opposite for several reasons: low rates are associated with low inflation, low rates make it much cheaper to build and operate apartment buildings, etc.
Counter productive in what ways? Rent control works great for Montreal and has for years. That city is very affordable to live in, because of it.
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That's about the cost of a studio in DC.
For further comparison I pay hundreds less for an upscale (but not top of the line) 2 bedroom apartment in a Minneapolis suburb.
I would way rather be paying more for a city home :)