San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S. • Hacker News Board

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#591

Post by lukeschlather » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

juniper_strong wrote: post #451

lukeschlather wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WFH is fine. Bothers me not at all. I hate not being able to breathe the same air as my friends. It makes so many things impossible - things that are also impossible unless my friends mostly live within 30 minutes travel of me.

Have you made your last friend or could you make different ones if you moved somewhere else?

Moving to a rural area is even worse. In principle I can maintain friendships with people separated by any distance from me, but there's no substitute for being in a highly populated area in terms of making new friends. And the more highly populated the better.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#592

Post by bigdollopenergy » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 3:31 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #453

adjkant wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is curious to me is that NYC rents haven't seen the same crater at all (link says 15% but anecdotally most of the desirable top of market neighborhoods aren't budging). I don't buy the "SF is not very fun during the pandemic" rationale as more special than any other notable city, and NYC tends to have less space than SF. To me, that says the SF case has more complexity. IMO, the key factor here is that there app…

I haven't seen rents really drop in LA either. Commercial landlords would rather let the building go half vacant and try offering 1-2 months of free rent before they drop the base rent.

From what I've read, in the case of commercial lets there's a good reason for this.

The companies that manage these properties acquire/refinance loans based on the value of their assets and the value of their assets is mostly determined by the rent they ask for, much less the rent they are actually getting. This leads to commercial landlords refusing to budge on a ridiculous price that was determined in different market conditions and as a result will opt to leave it vacant.

Taking the lower price would adversely affect their access to financing and could put them under water (they already were) on their loans.

Why these agreement/loans don't take this problem into account to prevent this situation is a total mystery though.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#593

Post by cactus2093 » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #278

lhorie wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salaries do get affected by WFH policies, since if you move to a cheaper state/country, a company will often do a pay adjustment. So, from a cost savings perspective, it becomes a question of how much a company thinks being in the Bay Area brings in terms of attracting talent, vs how much they can save by having their employees work from Pennsylvania or Canada or India. I know companies in Canada that are way ahead o…

I am skeptical that the labor market for high quality tech talent is as large in the rest of the country or that it is that tied to COL. The US vs not US gap seems much larger than the HCOL vs LCOL for senior IC jobs.

Do you know of any remote-first tech company that pays Bay Area salaries regardless of location?

I haven’t heard of one, and I would think this would be a huge selling point so anyone doing it would want to advertise it to engineers.

On the other hand there are plenty of companies transparent about their policy to match pay to cost of living, for instance gitlab publishes their conversion percentages for different cities. Many places in the US they pay ~60% of Bay Area.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#594

Post by mywittyname » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 3:38 PM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #270

mywittyname wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of my leases had buy-out provisions, usually one or two months of rent. I've never lived in SF, but I'm going to guess that tenant-friendly laws in California combined with historically good price growth provided landlords with an incentive to make it easy for tenants to break leases. I know more than a few people from SF who were paid to break their leases. More churn means more "market adjustments" for rent pri…

You're confusing a few things. Because SF (until recently) has disproportionately been a sellers market, leases are written such that they benefit the landlord. Buyout clauses are not symmetric and are uncommon in SF. In the context you described, both the tenant and the landlord have incentives: the landlord wants to pay you to break the lease so they can charge higher prices, the tenant might want to accept the mon…

> You're confusing a few things. Because SF (until recently) has disproportionately been a sellers market, leases are written such that they benefit the landlord.

Right, which is why it makes sense that landlords would allow tenants to break leases for a fee. The landlord gets two/three months of rent from the current tenant, plus they have a waiting list of people and will have the unit moved into within a few days paying higher rent.

So the benefits to the landlord is more money. They get to legally double-charge for rent and raise rent prices on an accelerated schedule at the cost of one or two days of lost occupancy.

The only time this doesn't benefit the landlords is when rent prices collapse. But considering SF rent prices have been inflating at a double digit annual clip for a decade or more now, I doubt any landlord considered a drop in rent prices to be possible.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#595

Post by gmadsen » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

tchaffee wrote: post #431

gmadsen wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but this is wrong. Food scenes require diverse cultures. Small town USA doesn't have 50+ ethnic groups making restaurants downtown

France, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Basque, and Japan are all examples of places with mostly one ethnic group and great food scenes.

fair point. I think my comment was US centric. There really isn't a cuisine culture in a lot of small usa towns. Probably do to the short lived actual history of the US, and the nearly forced consumption of preservative ridden and processed food following the world wars.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#596

Post by asdff » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

MAGZine wrote: post #545

e9 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it’s weird. I haven’t seen for rent signs before but now I see them on every single building but rents are same. It probably means landlords are basically charging too much and making too much money and not paying enough in taxes(1-2% tax increase per year is probably nothing compared to increases in rent prices)

if you do the math, it's expensive to let a unit sit for more than a couple months as opposed to offering a discount on the rent. This assumes your tenant will turnover in a couple years time, mind you. I did the math for SF and IIRC ~2mo was equal to a 15% discount. if it sits empty for longer than 2mo, you should have just given the 15% discount. if you let is sit for 2mo AND have to give a 15% discount, now you've…

I think properties are somehow valued based on the rent potential, so landlords are disincentivized to move base rent and would rather offer 1-2-3 months free and keep rent at standard rate.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#597

Post by asdff » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

e9 wrote: post #458

asdff wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen rents really drop in LA either. Commercial landlords would rather let the building go half vacant and try offering 1-2 months of free rent before they drop the base rent.

Yeah it’s weird. I haven’t seen for rent signs before but now I see them on every single building but rents are same. It probably means landlords are basically charging too much and making too much money and not paying enough in taxes(1-2% tax increase per year is probably nothing compared to increases in rent prices)

Considering prices have surged over the last two decades, landlords are making money hand over fist. Tax is teensy thanks to prop 13.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#598

Post by irrational » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

Pokepokalypse wrote: post #537

colinmhayes wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying wfh is as productive as in office, but the tech stack needed to make wfh work became available only very recently. Skype didn't cut it.

I would flag github as a more crucial requirement. We've had various im/irq platforms for decades. They weren't really a substitute for video - but video is only a tiny fraction of team communications, and simple chat satisfies most of those requirements.

Instead of github you should say code repositories. We used subversion back in the earlier 2000s to do remote work with contractors. It worked just as good as GitHub for remote collaboration.

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#599

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

onecommentman wrote: post #531

asdff wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the answer to that question depends entirely on the employer. While some are making waves becoming remote companies, the vast majority are chomping at the bit to get butts in seats. I know several people who have been called back in, to sit in an enclosed office in their cubicle for 8 hours a day with their mask on doing the same exact task that could be accomplished on their laptop at home. Why? No reason at…

Care to share the actual names of who these several companies are, requiring workers to take on the additional COVID risk with no actual business requirement? The companies, not the people. Not to be skeptical, but I will be. Government, small business, big corporations?

[deleted]

Re: San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S.

#600

Post by whimsicalism » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

cactus2093 wrote: post #593

whimsicalism wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am skeptical that the labor market for high quality tech talent is as large in the rest of the country or that it is that tied to COL. The US vs not US gap seems much larger than the HCOL vs LCOL for senior IC jobs.

Do you know of any remote-first tech company that pays Bay Area salaries regardless of location? I haven’t heard of one, and I would think this would be a huge selling point so anyone doing it would want to advertise it to engineers. On the other hand there are plenty of companies transparent about their policy to match pay to cost of living, for instance gitlab publishes their conversion percentages for different ci…

There's like a $25k difference between Google L4 in the Bay vs in Boulder and with considerably less average years of experience. That's less than the COL difference.

https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...