Having slipped back under $2,300 a month a few weeks ago, the weighted average asking rent for an apartment in Oakland has since inched up around 2 percent to a little over $2,300 a month but is still 12 percent lower than at the same time last year and 22 percent below a 2016-era peak of closer to $3,000 per month.
At the same time, the implied apartment vacancy rate in Oakland, based on listing activity, has held relatively firm over the past couple of weeks. But there are still over twice as many apartments listed for rent in Oakland than there were at the same time last year and the “discount” for renting an apartment in Oakland versus San Francisco, which was averaging around 35 percent prior to COVID, has dropped to 25 percent with rents in San Francisco, which appear to have bottomed, having dropped around 25 percent since the pandemic hit versus a 14 percent drop in Oakland.
2016 was the ridiculous. We had things like the Ghost Ship fire with 36 people dead. Thousands of units of substandard slum housing rented out for extortionist prices.
Oakland has added a lot of units since 2018. 10k plus? We actually have a healthy functional market with some amount of tenant choice.
Thank goodness those days are behind us now.