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Comment by wgjordan | Hacker News Reader

From the article, data seems to show sellers flooding the market in San Francisco:

> In San Francisco, list prices have fallen 4.9% year over year and inventory has risen 96% with a flood of new listings.

> When comparing the principal city to its surrounding suburbs, the San Francisco metro area does break the mold. Higher levels of inventory, up 96% YoY following a flood of new listings during the pandemic, are sitting on the market in the city proper, a significantly larger jump than the surrounding suburbs.

> In San Francisco [...] the softening is clear as sellers inundate the market and buyers have not changed their pace to match — newly pending sales in the city are up only 1.7% YoY.

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San Francisco was one of the tightest real estate markets in the country for years. Even doubling inventory doesn't make it a buyer's market.

Doubling it won't even make it close to other markets. https://www.zillow.com/research/data/

Looking at it doesn't even make sense to me. I'm looking at "For-Sale Inventory (Raw, All Homes, Monthly/Weekly)" and getting the same numbers for the previous year in June. (Around 5,000-6,000) Where's this huge 96% increase...?

Not only that, but listings plummeted with Covid. I'd be interested to see how the cumulative inventory compares to this time last year.

If all those people who were going to sell in March, April and May just delayed until now, you'd see a big jump in inventory, but the overall number of homes changing hands might not have changed.

I said no to Amazon for this Defense startup. Tons of options, cash, and fringe benefits. I am now, after seven or so years of calling myself a Gay San Franciscan Techie (immigrant) in a position of deciding whether buying a home in San Francisco is opportune seeing that I cannot seem to leave the city and could use the motivation. I have a big percentage of leverage in terms of implied income/cash flow/credit etc. Just don’t know if I’d be better off elsewhere maybe 70 miles upward of SF.

I love Portland, it’s cheaper than here. Seems unexplored, in spite of how eponymous they’ve become. Portland ticks all my boxes. I have family with me here and they do not like the cold weather (we’re from Miami).

If you look at Redfin, the majority of the increase in inventory is downtown. Everyone who owns a smallish condo, is selling it, or attempting to right now.

Look at the places sold last month downtown, you'll see prices go under asking, or well below what they would have been at 6 months ago.

This is in stark contrast to the rest of San Francisco where inventory looks normal, but prices are 10-20% higher than they would have been 6 months ago.

What this tells me is this, people have more purchasing power because of lower interest rates and are selling their downtown condos to move out to the spacious parts of the city. (or moving further south)

This is a typical problem with "median value" reporting. RE data needs to be examined in a very granular way to be useful, most of the time.

Note that a doubling of inventory in SF still leaves SF with only half the per-capita inventory of New York. Even right now the market is ridiculously tight.

Note also that current inventory levels fall between 2009-2010 levels. Those were not years during which SF lost population.

I don’t think sellers will be able to dictate the terms. I don’t think you understand what the collapse of this nation looks like: it will be a gradual process; a gradual drift from the reserve currency into more appeasing debt, from some unemployment in certain regions, to the clustering of wealth elsewhere, private islands in Nicaragua, Singapore, Vietnam, New Zealand, Canada, I can definitely see places like the Basque Country essential locations with a good combination of European standards and the outdoors.

If Trump gets relected Kiss the cities goodbye. If Trump gets relected we’ll devolve to some banana republic with fancy gated communities for the few and massive homelessness. To quote Huckaby, a vote for Republican Maverick unfettered capitalism would be a vote for Trump.

I bought eggs today. There's a 1200% flood of new eggs in my fridge!

Some might consider it relevant that I had two eggs before that.

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