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Comment by MarkSweep | Hacker News Reader

> The median one-bedroom asking rent in San Francisco was $2,190 in November 2023

This number must be dragged down by rent-controlled. It seems too low. At apartments.com, there are 1777 listings for one bedroom apartments in SF. There are only 112 apartments listed for below $2200.

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Possible the numbers are wrong, but "asking rent" means the non-rent-controlled price, ie. what you would get if you rented one new today.

Unless the laws changed, rent controlled apartments are rented out at market rate, and then price increases are strictly controlled.

I lived in a rent controlled apartment in SF for a year. What was frustrating was realizing that I was paying significantly more rent than other tenants in similar units.

What you’re saying seems incompatible to me. Either they’re rented out at market rate, or their prices are strictly controlled.

How did you end up paying more than comp with a rent controlled unit? That doesn’t make much sense.

New tenants have to pay market rate to begin renting. Rent control kicks in after that and prevents the rent from increasing much.

If the other renters had been there for many years, they'd still be paying market rate (plus a bit) from years earlier. That could be a lot less than market rate now.

That's why renters in rent-controlled units tend not to move as much - as market rates go up, your rent gets relatively cheaper over time and that's an incentive to stay put.

The rent is frontloaded. It averages out over the long run, but landlords charge more at the beginning of the lease to make up some of the difference caused by rent controls by the time the lease ends.

It wasn't that way when I shopped for an apartment in SF. (Summer 2008.)

The rent controlled landlords struggled, and didn't have much, or any, wiggle room for upkeep. (Just look at the Parkmerced saga. The place was a dump, but politics prevented them from fixing it.)

I moved into my rent controlled apartment because it was a good deal; the non-rent-control apartments actually cost more at the time.

To me it’s more like if you have a non-rent controlled place you have to make it more attractive with lower prices, which is OK as you can just increase like hell after a year.

If you increase it, people can just move

Imagine: you’re in the middle of crunch time at work, your wife is pregnant, you receive some notice that the rent is going to increase ten folds in two weeks, good luck.

Imagine: you are a single techie living in SF, you get the notice and move to another apartment :D.

Why would you be single in sf

That’s the game. When I was looking for a place during covid I could have gotten some dope appartements for much cheaper than the rent controlled ones, hell they would even throw a free month sometimes lol. But I knew all of these would jack up their prices right after your lease ends. It blows my mind that some people don’t look for rent controlled apartments.

I think it might be right, because while most of us tech folks on HN would be living in nicely kept old-school buildings or in new construction, most of SF is quite poor and might be living in areas like Mission or Excelsior and Bayview, basically SE of the city.

I've seen "low" rents there, but you get to live in a rough looking neighborhood and its not very clean or safe.

To be fair, if you're making 170-240k base you can easily afford 3-4k per month rent to live in a nicer building. People who are in relationships can stretch this even further, not to mention the RSUs/options.

Also, people live all the way down to SJ and then up the east bay. Rents in SJ are like 2500/mo for a single bedroom in a newer building, but its not that great of an area tbh. In mid-peninsula its comparable to SF rents because it is really nice, safe, and you get a lot more families. There are no homeless and barely any crime there, and SF is just 20-30 min away.

> Rents in SJ are like 2500/mo for a single bedroom in a newer building, but its not that great of an area tbh

Schools are better. Most techies are Asian or Eastern European immigrants, so school rankings matter.

That's why a house in San Ramon is much more expensive than a house in Walnut Creek despite WC being better connected by public transit.

Yeah for sure. I mean those areas are pretty far from each other (from SJ), but I get your point.

Personally I find the peninsula to be the best in terms of opportunities/quality of life/cost.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but listing in apartments.com is not really the best dataset to look at, as its usually slightly nicer listings there. Have to combine with Craigslist at the very least where a lot of people look for cheaper places. That said, $2200 for 1bed still seems kinda low.

Nope. $2190 sounds about right. If you don't live in Mission Bay, Rincon Hill, or Cow Hollow that's around how much you can expect a 1 bedroom to be in most neighborhoods.

Most listings are posted on the Property Owner's website (eg. Gaetani, RentSF, etc), not on apartments.com, Zillow, or Craigslist. Those are where us townies fleece transplants.

Before the pandemic, I had a 1 bedroom in Nob Hill for around that much before upgrading to Mission Bay.

Generally apartments.com had the more premium newer buildings in SF. It’s better to look at Craigslist for a fuller picture

The cheap ones on Craigslist are scams though

Yeah. There's a widespread scam on CL where they take pictures and text from an MLS sale listing and post it on CL for a surprisingly low price. It's an identity theft scam. They try to get you to apply to qualify for a site tour.

Bah, there goes my paranoia. I was already deeply uncomfortable with the amount of information my landlord demanded to sign the lease. Now I know that it has straight up been used for identity theft.

jeffbee did not write that the landlord commits fraud using tenants’ information. They wrote scammers pretending to be landlords do that.

The crazy cheap ones are, but I live in an apartment I found on there. Just don’t put money down without visiting

I think it’s something else. I was recently apartment hunting and most of the vacant apartments in the city are offering 1-3 months free but are keeping the overall rent high. Which brings down the annual rent to anywhere from 10-25% lower, but the monthly rent stays well over the median that’s being reported.

Unfortunately, to carry that low annualized rent forward, one must move annually.

Same in NYC.

Streeteasy has a data dashboard and is showing that % of rentals offering concessions is at an all time high (excluding the covid anomaly)

this is due to rent control. Landlord don't want to lose advantage of "high base"

It doesn't work that way. The first year base rent is all the rent paid divided by 12.

Wouldn't asking rent be the current price for a new lease? Rent control resets for new leases.

Numbers would be FAR lower if rent control was factored in.

>50% of renters in SF are on rent control.

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