San Francisco continues to capture peoples’ hearts…and their wallets if/when they decide to make it their home.
In just the first half of 2018, San Francisco home prices have increased $205,000 to an average home cost of $1.62M within city limits, according to the San Francisco real estate agency Paragon. Condominium prices have raised a mere $71,000 to an average cost of $1.2M.
The tech boom in Silicon Valley gets credit for this latest explosion in San Francisco home prices. But, wait a second…didn’t market experts predict that the tech boom would quiet down in 2018?
They did, but those experts didn’t count on Softbank’s $100B Vision Fund, kicked off in 2017, to infuse massive amounts of new money into new Silicon Valley start-ups. They also didn’t anticipate that Sequoia Capital, another huge venture capital player, would step up to Softbank’s plate and infuse even more massive millions into the market.
Timing, you know the adage that luck and timing are everything, has added its two cents into San Francisco’s housing kitty. The tech IPO market is having a great year this 2018, led by such enterprise software companies as Dropbox and Zuora. And then, the “old stand-byes,” Apple, Google, Netflix, Alphabet, Facebook and Salesforce, are also having stellar years.
Add these infusions of millions from venture capital firms to incredible bottom line growth for investors and workers to an extreme lack of new housing supply and growing numbers of foreign investors. All of this equals yet another explosion in San Francisco’s home prices.
How many explosions can this City By The Bay have before its housing market goes POP?
As long as San Francisco has some of the most beautiful geography in the world and people like William Saroyan, Mark Twain, Joe Di Maggio, Duke Ellington and Walter Cronkite sing its praises, perhaps forever?
I’m with Herb Cain, the late, legendary journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who said, “One day if I go to heaven…I’ll look around and say, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.’”
