Bay Area rents down for second straight quarter

I'm seeing both ends of this. My roommate is moving out because she's worried about her job and is looking for a cheaper place so she can save up some money. I'm looking to upgrade, because decent 1BRs are now only a couple hundred more than I pay for my room now. Places that were $1700+ when I looked at them in December are now going for under $1400, and there're even a few 1BRs (in crummy complexes) available for under $1000, whereas there was nothing under $1200 back then.

I'm also noticing that there's a lot of shifting around with my coworkers' friends/roommates. A lot of people are moving around, either because they're not secure in their jobs and want to downgrade, or because they're bargain-hunting and want to upgrade.

I live with 4 other people in SF. Our one-year lease is up in July, and even the most cursory browsing of craigslist shows that we're far overpaying for our apartment, even within our immediate neighborhood.

Landlord offered to drop our rent by $750 for next year. Any other time, we might have taken it; but now we can live in a bigger, nicer apartment for $1500 less.

supposedly business rental areas have drastically cut prices. hackerdojo was looking for office rental space for awesome hacker mayhem and managed to find a space at 40 cents a square foot, or $4000 for a 10,000 square foot space in a downtown location.

I was trying to rent my 2 br (technically 1 br since 2nd br was large but didn't have closet) place in hayes valley and saw this happen nearly in the blink of an eye: I had a renter ready to go at $3,000/ mo in December, but foolishly turned him down because he needed it too quickly and I wasn't yet ready to move out. Then in January, a lot of people coming through kept mentioning how many 2 br's were out there, and I ultimately ended up renting it for $2650 after the applicant showed me several comps at lower prices.

To add another data point. I recently rented a 2 BR apt in a nice complex in Santa Clara for $1400. The ad asked for $1500, but I negotiated it down to $1400 with a slightly longer lease term. Just 6 months ago, the same apt was renting for $1800.