SF, Silicon Valley rents plunge amid downturn: 'Never seen anything like it'

... Rents for a one-bedroom apartment dropped most in the cities richest in high-paying tech jobs, falling 9.4% in San Francisco compared with May of 2019. In Mountain View, home to Google, rents fell 15.9% year over year, while in Apple’s hometown of Cupertino rents dipped 14.3%, according to the rental search engine Zumper. In San Bruno, where YouTube has its offices, rents tumbled 14.9%.

“It’s a dramatic drop in San Francisco and the South Bay,” said Zumper CEO Anthemos Georgiades. “This is real. We have never seen anything like it.”

While rents are down across the country, the drop was more severe in high-priced coastal cities that over the past decade have been most attractive to tech entrepreneurs and their investors, Georgiades said. Several of the biggest employers in those cities, including Facebook and Google, are allowing employees to work from home through the end of the year, while San Francisco’s Twitter and Square have said many employees will be allowed to work remotely permanently. ...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/San-Francisco-Silicon-Valley-rents-saw-sharp-15307118.php

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