Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

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From TFA: "In San Francisco, list prices have fallen 4.9% year over year and inventory has risen 96% with a flood of new listings. This divergence of active inventory is not evident in cities like Miami, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Seattle."

I'm not in San Francisco, but if we were to experience a doubling of inventory here in Seattle, it would be evidence of a big shift in the market. We neighbor-visited an open house on our block in the autumn that was attended by at least a person a minute during the half-hour that we were there.

The article is super interesting for its incongruence with local anecdotes, but it would also suggest that the "techie exodus" in SF has some roots in reality.

One thing people seem to forget is that leaving SF doesn't mean leaving the Bay Area. A lot of the people leaving SF are going to end up in the surrounding cities, which were always cheaper and considered more boring than SF. Now that SF is locked down, all of the Bay Area is equally boring, so you might as well live in San Mateo and cut your rent in half.

> live in San Mateo and cut your rent in half

I think that's stretching... It's still very expensive in the burbs due to their proximity to big tech companies. I am not seeing rent be half in the peninsula compared to SF.

Yeah definitely not San Mateo, but east bay will do that. My realtor says her business in SF and the peninsula is drying up, but east bay is hotter than ever.

Well let's see if it's techies moving pretty if it's other people. In my Bay Area adjacent town, there's toooons of homes for sale but they are not newly purchased within the last 10-15 years, but homes that have been held for decades.

There's also a huge exodus of people from SF that have lost jobs.

It could be techies, but I'll wait and see the numbers to judge that, a mere overall exodus does not equate to a techie exodus for a city where techies are such a small part of the population, but which dominate so much of the discussion.

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