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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

> The median-priced home in San Francisco sells for $1.5 million, according to Paragon. It's not uncommon for buyers to bid hundreds of thousands above asking and pay in all cash.

Who are these people? There are a lot of homes there, so there must be a whole lot of buyers with $1M in cash. There are enough of them that they even try to outbid each other by slapping an extra $100k no top of asking price.

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There actually aren't a whole lot of homes on the market (much of the city's housing stock is either rental properties or is owned by longtime residents who ain't moving anytime soon), but to answer your question: anyone who's been at Google, Apple, or Facebook since 2009, got stock options, and held them. Google stock has appreciated 7x since then, Apple 10x, FB a whopping 35x. $100K in stock options is actually a pretty small options package over 4 years, but if you got that much in FB stock when the whole company was worth $15B, that's now worth $3.5M.

Thanks, I think that explains it. I guess with enough tech companies and enough exits happening they'd be good amount of these people to skew the market.

And the market in SF and other Bay Area cities is _really small_. I recently read that Cupertino has only a dozen houses on the market total, and SF may have as many as hundreds or even a couple thousand (in a city with a population over 800,000). Actually, I just looked at Zillow and there are 17 properties on the market in Cupertino, which had about 20,000 households as of 2010.

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