In your either horrifying or glorious (depending on who you are) residential real estate news for the day, here's what you need to know: the median price for a home in San Francisco is now one million dollars. The average asking rent for a San Francisco apartment is $3,229. Tech shuttles might be responsible for the increases in one or both of those figures. And reality TV cameras will be here to record the whole thing.
Let's start with apartment news! Rental prices remain staggeringly high in San Francisco: $2,583 for a studio, $3,042 for a one bedroom/bath, and $4,248 for a two bedroom/two bathroom apartment, as of the second quarter of 2014, according to a survey by apartment data source RealFacts. That's an increase of 9.4% since last year.
However, while some property managers say that the demand for SF apartments is as strong as ever, others say that things might be getting easier for prospective renters. Nick Grotjahn, a spokesperson for RealFacts, tells the Chron that the last six months have seen a slight drop in demand for rental units, and that "instead of getting 30 applicants for a unit, they might get only 20."
Bill Meyer, president of San Francisco's WM Properties tells the Chron that they're also seeing a slowdown, saying that "Not only is the number of applications down to one or two, traffic is also down. A year and a half ago, we had 15 people show up the first night (of an open house). Now it's down to two or three."
However, that anecdotal rental demand decrease hasn't translated to home prices. According to a report released Wednesday by real estate data company DataQuick, June's million-dollar median is the all-time high price for single-family homes and condos in any Bay Area city.
In a moment of apparent synchronicity, TV network Bravo announced this week that it'd be expanding its Million Dollar Listing franchise of real estate reality programming to San Francisco. (Just so you know: MDL: NY is great and amazing and the others are crap.) Picture it: San Francisco, where even the median-priced listing might be worth a slot on a extravagance-focused reality show!
Who's paying these nosebleed prices, and will therefore (we assume) be featured on the show? People from Asia and techies, suggests the Chron.
Many are tech workers with stock compensation from an initial public offering or takeover. Realtors call them "Google kids," even if they are 40 years old and work in biotech. A secondary group of cash buyers are investors from outside the country, mostly Asia, who see San Francisco as a relative bargain.
Speaking of the "Google kids," according to some realtors, it's proximity to tech shuttle stops that help jack up home prices by as much as 10%. And there's even a tier system among shuttle stops, as one realtor explained to SF Gate.
“It is not just that the buses run on a certain route, but how often they run," Kevin Birmingham of Park North Real Estate told the Gate. "I wanted to show a buyer a condo one block from a Google stop at 19th and Kirkham in the Inner Sunset, but he had no interest because the bus only runs once an hour.”
And if that doesn't sound like a Million Dollar Listing: SF plot point, what is?
