Having slipped at the end of last year with typical seasonality in play, the weighted average asking rent for an apartment in San Francisco ticked up 2 percent in January to $3,550 per month, which was less than 5 percent higher than at the same time last year and the smallest year-over-year increase in over a year, driven by an uptick in asking rent for studios, the average for which has ticked back up to around $2,100 per month, having dropped from a pre-Covid peak of over $2,600 a month to around $1,900 a month in early 2021. And yes, that was a complex sentence.
As such, the average asking rent in San Francisco is now 17 percent higher than its pandemic-driven low of $3,050 in the second quarter of 2021, but still 13 percent lower than prior to the pandemic and nearly over 20 percent below its 2015-era peak of nearly $4,500 a month, with the average apartment in San Francisco measuring around 2.4 bedrooms (when accounting for a studio as having one).
At the same time, the number of apartments listed for rent in San Francisco ticked up around 5 percent last month and is now running close to 20 percent higher than prior to the pandemic, with the inventory of condos and single-family homes for sale currently up around 20 percent up as well but poised to climb.
Our analysis of the rental market in San Francisco is based on over 165,000 data points going back to 2004 that we maintain, normalize and index on a monthly basis. We’ll keep you posted and plugged-in.
Seasonality strikes again