While the net number of homes on the market in San Francisco had been holding at a seasonally adjusted 10-year high, inventory levels ticked up 7 percent over the past week, driven by listings for single-family homes, the inventory of which is now 45 percent higher than at the same time last year.
Once again, the uptick in inventory is being driven driven by sharp drop in the pace of local home sales, the pace of which actually ticked down over the past week from their lowest levels in over six years on a seasonally adjusted basis, with nearly 50 percent fewer homes in contract right now than there were at the same time last year and the average price per square foot of the homes which are in contract having been down an average of 9 percent on a year-over-year basis this month and 10 percent lower than last May.
Other sources saying SF office vacancy rate has shot up to new record high above 29%. Wonder if that has anything to do with it? Or we can keep pretending its about other things?
The solution is clearly to force coders back to the office five days a week where they can meet in person to work on programs that facilitate remote work and online meetings…¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That’s when they are not on video calls with the rest of the team in Oregon/Texas/Europe/Asia.
Depends on who “we” are, and what you mean by “pretending”.
Some folks, many of whom are among the flippers, developers, and other hangers-on who have arrived here from elsewhere to make their fortune in the S.F. real estate “game”, will assign both the responsibility for office vacancy and decrease in home sales volume to the same litany of things they’ve been complaining about for years: The Homelessness Gross Receipts Tax. The Overpaid Executive Tax. The Vacancy tax. The continuing refusal of The Mayor to wave her magic wand and make the homeless camps disappear once and for all, the Ninth Circuit’s holding in Martin v. City of Boise notwithstanding. The specter of nonprofits pushing to operate formal, permanent overdose-prevention sites, even though the Tenderloin Center in United Nations Plaza was shut down at The Mayor’s order last year. And so on.
What you will not get is those people to admit that this is the late capitalist system working as advertised: corporate executives are working to reduce their operating costs, commercial rents are a substantial operating cost that has a straightforward path to reduction, and so they are pursuing it. Similarly, many highly-paid employees of some of those same firms are attempting to reduce the amounts that they pay for housing.
Its a reckoning for the SF market. If under-utilized space is included maybe 35% vacancy?
Why don’t you come out and tell us that you’re working on constructing a short bet against S.F. commercial real estate?
By all means, lay out your investment thesis and how you’re going about implementing it. Shorting locally-focused CMBS? You’ve found a local bank overly exposed to the S.F. “class A” office space market and you’re purchasing put options on their stock? Do tell. I’m sure there’s going to be plenty of room on your side of those trades for everybody reading this.