San Francisco rents hitting new highs

Rents in San Francisco continue to rise. A new report from rental marketplace Zumper shows the rent for a one-bedroom in the city hit a new all-time high of $4,430 a month. That's up 26% from last year. For more on some of the trends we are seeing in the rental market, we welcome Crystal Chen from Zumper. Good morning, Crystal. Thank you for joining us. Morning. Thanks for having me. First of all, boy, rents are so high. A lot of that is has been tied to tech and the growth of AI in the city in particular. Is that saturated at this point with everyone who can pay those prices are in or are you going to continue to see those high prices? Yeah, so AI-driven hiring and leasing is landing in San Francisco, where there's just really little new housing being built. I mean, San Francisco's rental vacancy rate is under 4%. AI companies have leased almost 3 million square feet. of SF office space in the first half of this year. So more well-paid workers want to be close to the office and they're just really competing for a fixed stock of apartments. And like you said, since rents are up 26% since this time last year, people who are living in San Francisco already are less likely to move. So that just keeps more units off the market. So more and more people are bidding for less and less units, which is really fueling these double-digit growth rates. And we can see kind of that spillover of demand in the rest of the Bay Area. Emeryville rents had the next large annual growth rate in the Bay Area up over 20% as well. Well, we can see Oakland rents are up 7 percent year over year, too. And then, yeah, down the peninsula, we're seeing rents grow as well. Yeah, it's spreading out from the big cities, the bigger cities in particular, you know, San Francisco. Thank You know, some of the bigger cities are talking about things that they can do, maybe converting some of these empty office spaces. That takes some time and money. New York has instituted a rent freeze. Talk about that. And and will we see something like that? Yeah, so New York's rent freeze is on rent-stabilized apartments, you not apartments that are just out on the open market. know, So I think that it really, it just happened last month. So it will really see what's the effect of that is going to be. But I think similarly, it might cause, again, people to just stay in their units if they don't have. So, you know, pay more rent. And that just, again, takes more units off of the market for everyone to compete for, which may continue to drive up rent as well. I mean, San Francisco is the second most expensive city in the nation, only behind New York City, where one beds are at forty six ten. So San Francisco is definitely inching toward that city as well. And as you mentioned, people are also staying because mortgage rates are so high, they can't come up. I mean, if you're paying that much for rent, it's hard to kind of save for a down payment as well. So people are staying in those rentals. You're also something new that you are looking at there at Zumper is monthly fees. I mean, we're used to like HOAs, like if you own something, but what are these monthly fees that renters are having or maybe surprised by? Yeah, so we are starting to look into incorporating listing all fees. It's mostly for big buildings that have kind of recurring monthly fees. Thank And I think only about 8% of our listings really list monthly fees. But to become more transparent, we have a total monthly price on Zumper now for those types of buildings. So it's not going to be a surprise how much you end up paying if you are interested in something like that. you. And that's across the nation. Yeah, it's just, boy, there's so many costs associated, and it's supply and demand. If people are willing to pay that, I guess until that balance is out. Crystal Chen from Rental Marketplace Zumper, thank you so much for joining us and sharing the trends with us.