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What can I do to prevent this in the future?

If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware.

If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices.

Article source: https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/07/13/link-logistics-puts-1-million-sf-of-bay-area-industrial-space-on-market/

Median sale prices for single-family homes slid last month in all of the Bay Area’s nine counties except Solano, according to the association’s figures. Marin County’s median sale price in June was $1.8 million and represented a 14% decline from May — the biggest month-over-month decline in the Bay Area.

Monthly median prices declined by 8% in Alameda, roughly 6% in San Francisco and Santa Clara, and 5% in Contra Costa.

California’s median sale price in June was $863,790, down 4% from May’s median of $900,170. The association expects California’s median sales prices will go up just 9.7% in 2022 compared to last year, when home prices went up by almost 20%.

Home sales saw more notable declines across the Bay Area and California.

Bay Area sales dropped by roughly 27% in June compared to last year. San Francisco (15% decline) and San Mateo (19%) had some of the region’s biggest month-over-month drops in sales last month. Year-over-year sales declined by double digits in every county in the Bay Area and Southern California, according to the association.

“Excluding the three-month pandemic lockdown period in 2020, June’s sales level was the lowest since April 2008. Pending sales data also suggests we can expect additional retreating in the coming months,” Jordan Levine, chief economist for the California Association of Realtors, said in a statement. “With inflation remaining high and interest rates expected to climb further in the coming months, the market will normalize further in the second half of the year with softer sales and more moderate price growth.”

Climbing mortgage rates and faltering stock prices have made the Bay Area one of the fastest-cooling markets in the country. Bay Area home values also went down in June for the first time since the start of the pandemic, according to Zillow.

Real estate agents said the changing dynamics have given active homebuyers more leverage as bidding wars become less common. But rising interest rates have also shut out many prospective buyers as the cost of buying a home in one of the world’s priciest regions becomes more expensive.

Slowing demand from home buyers has led to a modest bump in inventory — statewide, it reached its highest level since 2019 but remains low, overall — and home listings are on the market slightly longer. Listings in the Bay Area sat on the market a median of 12 days in June.

While the region’s housing market has begun a cooldown, it remains hotter than it was before the pandemic. In San Francisco, for example, 88% of homes sold in June went above asking price.

Sheila Cunha, president of the Bay East Association of Realtors, said June’s market slowdown signals that home prices will begin to “stabilize” after soaring to record highs during COVID.

The Pleasonton-based real estate agent said local inventory has gone up higher “than we’ve ever had in a long time,” though listings are sitting on the market longer. Slowing demand will give buyers more time to consider their options and negotiate with sellers.

“It’s kind of like a return to how it used to be before the pandemic hit — where a buyer had an opportunity to look at a house for longer than 15 minutes before making the most important decision of their life,” Cunha said. “Sellers have been very blessed these last three years. They’ve seen upwards of 40% increase in prices in their homes, which is not normal.”

Article source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-01/will-home-prices-fall-sudden-housing-turn-has-sellers-paring-expectations

A decade ago, young techies poured into The City, driving up rents, crowding the sidewalks of Valencia Street in the Mission, piling up on the hills of Dolores Park like sea lions in the sun.

Some of us loved to complain about them. They were entitled, clueless, disrespectful and plentiful. They flocked to the Bay Area from 2011-2015, when the tech industry created nearly 121,000 new jobs.

Bay Area colleges, meanwhile, produced around 31,000 graduates with tech degrees. The resulting gap of 90,000 openings created a new Gold Rush, and a “brain gain” that led the nation. Dallas ranked a distant second, with a brain gain of 25,000.

Here’s what the metrics reveal, and why it matters.

Every year in its Scoring Tech Talent report, the commercial real estate company Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis calculates which cities are gaining and losing tech talent by tracking the local college graduates with tech degrees and the tech jobs gained or lost there.

A brain gain means a money gain. San Francisco’s chief economist, Ted Egan, estimated each tech worker before the pandemic generated roughly $650,000 annually to The City’s economy, based on spending at local establishments and businesses, and employers’ spending on local suppliers. That means the brain gain of 2011-2015 brought The City nearly $300 million.

Let’s just pause for a moment here in 2022 and think about the fact that we resented 90,000 new tech workers who brought in $300 million in city revenue. Today, tech layoffs are mounting and workers are leaving as SoMa shuts down and mid-Market’s revitalization seems like a distant dream.

Those young techies did go away, just like we wished at the time. The Bay Area is now producing more tech grads than tech jobs, resulting in a “brain drain” that sends new techies out of the region.

The Bay Area added around 42,000 tech jobs from 2016-2021, while graduating more than 49,000 from colleges with tech degrees. That means a brain drain of 7,000 Bay Area grads who had no opportunity to work here in tech. That would have been unheard of a decade ago. Seattle, Portland, Austin, Denver and others vaulted past the Bay Area, which sank to 26th in the nation when it comes to gaining or losing tech talent.

“A larger share of tech expansion has occurred outside of the Bay Area since 2015,” says Colin Yasukochi, CBRE’s executive director of tech insights. At the same time at Bay Area colleges, “more students chose to pursue tech careers. Combined, these have lowered the brain gain.”

Lowered it into negative numbers. We aren’t gaining brains anymore. We’re losing them.

The report did find the Bay Area still has the largest number of tech workers in the nation, 378,870, with the highest percentage of total employment in the nation, 11.4%.

But the infusion of young workers has stopped. The Bay Area is not in the top 10 regions in the nation by percentage of people aged 20-24, the CBRE report found.

And it’s not just that young tech workers aren’t coming here. Many are also leaving. Egan found U.S. Census data shows the number of tech workers under 40 who left San Francisco from 2019-2020 was double what it was from 2012-2013.

“It’s not historically unusual for young San Francisco-based workers to move to the suburbs as that age, but CBRE’s report is pointing to a migration out of the Bay Area as a whole, which is unusual and a troublesome sign for the future,” says Egan. “It may be perceptions of the quality of life changed, or a demographic wave of millennials entered the housing market and discovered the housing cost difference between the Bay Area and other places.”

The loss of young tech workers is part of a larger trend, of course. LinkedIn found the Bay Area and New York were the only metro areas losing tech workers during the pandemic that previously gained them.

And the San Francisco tech industry group sf.citi wrote this in its report “Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus”:

“What we’re seeing today is nothing short of a mass migration of tech companies and tech employees outside of the San Francisco Bay Area.”

There was a time when many in The City would have high-fived over that news. A December 2013 story in The Examiner cited “Seething anger against what many see as the main source of San Francisco’s wealth driven woes: tech workers.”

There were flash fires everywhere as young techies said and did and posted things that outraged San Franciscans. That 2013 article cited a tech founder named Greg Gopman lashing out at homeless people in a Facebook post. In a famous viral video, Dropbox employees tried to kick local kids off a Mission soccer field because the techies had somehow reserved it online. There seemed to be weekly “Google bus” protests citing skyrocketing rents and evictions.

Longtime San Francisco public relations pro Sam Singer noted in 2013, “The tech industry is a vital part of San Francisco and the Bay Area… but from an image/credibility standpoint, it’s really suffering right now.”

Today, Singer sees a loss for The City in the departure of young techies. “Tech workers are the proverbial goose that laid the golden egg,” he says of their spending power and other participation in city life. “We should be doing everything to round them up, not chase the flock away.”

They don’t need chasing. As the Twitter building and Salesforce Tower sit mostly empty and downtown businesses struggle, the techies we wanted to go away are doing just that. And for what it’s worth, they remember their time in San Francisco differently than we do.

“Oh my God, San Francisco from 2009 to 2013 was just heaven on Earth,” says Jason Hreha, who graduated from Stanford in 2009 and consulted tech companies in The City with his startup, Dopamine. “It was filled with people who were passionate about what they were doing. Tech wasn’t just a career. It was a whole culture.”

Hreha says he lived with a succession of roommates in The Mission, Potrero Hill, Russian Hill and the Duboce Triangle, all within the span of four years. “It was kind of fun, always looking for a dream situation.”

Today Hreha lives in Nashville and is the CEO of Persona, a remote company that helps business leaders find executive assistants. “I wanted a fresh start, to go to a new place and reboot things,” he says. “I don’t think there really is a tech scene here. But for work today, it matters less where you live than ever before.”

It matters to the places where you live. And like empty nester parents who had longed for a little peace, some of us think it seems awfully quiet here now.

Article source: https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/the-city/the-techies-we-wanted-to-go-away-have-and-its-our-loss/article_664d7dfc-047f-11ed-ac9c-6f889ea33672.html

The efforts are backed by tenant advocates and some longtime homeowners worried about affordability, but opposed by many Realtors and questioned by groups more focused on new housing development. Along with ballot campaigns to strengthen eviction rules in Oakland and expedite housing approvals in San Francisco, the battle brewing over empty home taxes is one of several reform efforts emerging from the housing turmoil of the pandemic.

For voters who have already weathered confusing rent relief programs, clashes over eviction bans and widespread home bidding wars, the measures will test how much residents are willing to change a lucrative but increasingly unequal housing market. It’s all happening as inflation soars and Bay Area home values start to waiver for the first time in recent memory.

“There’s just this incredible need for housing,” said Sarah Karlinsky, a senior adviser to regional urban planning group SPUR. “People are looking at all different ways to either produce new housing or bring existing housing on (the) market, trying to make the most of what we have.”

In San Francisco, where campaigners led by District Five Supervisor Dean Preston are awaiting official certification for the November ballot, the proposed “Tax on Keeping Residential Units Vacant” would range from $2,500 to $5,000 in the first year, depending on the size of the unit. It would take effect in 2024 and apply to owners of buildings with three or more units vacant for more than 182 days a year, increasing to a maximum of $20,000 in later years.

Vacant single-family homes and duplexes would be exempt — a move that diverges from other cities and confounds some housing analysts, but which could expand campaign support from homeowners. That’s because Preston said his targets are “real estate speculators” operating large, high-end downtown developments, the likes of which he has repeatedly tied up through procedural moves or voted against building in the case of a 495-unit downtown development.

Recent data on investors buying up housing shows that the Bay Area is less of a target than more affordable markets like Atlanta or much of the Midwest. Still, a city report earlier this year estimated that the vacancy tax could bring about 4,500 units back onto the market and generate up to $38 million a year for affordable housing.

“Prolonged vacancies undermine the kind of progress we want to see on activating more housing,” Preston said. “A vacancy tax wouldn’t impact one way or another the conversation around how much housing we would be building.”

The Santa Cruz Empty Home Tax, which the City Council approved for the fall election in late June, would tax homes vacant for eight months or more each year at a rate of $6,000 for houses and $3,000 for condos or townhomes, with exceptions for accessory dwelling units if a primary residence is occupied.

Both the San Francisco and Santa Cruz measures include exemptions or modifications for short-term vacancies, like property owners doing renovations or in the process of finding a new tenant, and for owners facing financial hardship.

“We want to have that community feel, and in order for that to happen, we need people to be home,” said Cyndi Dawson, manager of the Yes on Empty Home Tax Santa Cruz campaign. “This is about neighbors wanting more neighbors.”

The varied California cities considering new vacancy taxes — big and small, job centers and tourist towns that have swelled with remote workers — are far from the first expensive places to evaluate added fees on owners of empty properties.

Vancouver saw around 2,000 housing units come back on the housing market in two years and generated $21.3 million in revenue for new affordable housing in 2019, though overall rents have still continued to climb. A recent U.S. analysis of vacancy rates and homelessness by researchers from the University of Washington also attributed San Francisco’s struggles with homelessness to a combination of high rents and already relatively low rental vacancy.

Across California, many factors drive unaffordability, but housing analysts increasingly focus on a central dynamic: a lack of flexibility to respond to rapid growth. The Bay Area’s population increased by around 1 million people since 2000, according to a 2021 SPUR report. But from 2011 to 2017, the region added 658,000 jobs and only 140,000 housing units — a mismatch that analysts say compounds inequality.

“First and foremost, we just need to produce way more housing at all income levels, and we need to be doing it all across the Bay Area,” Karlinsky said. “We’ve chronically under-produced housing for decades, and we are now reaping the results of our terrible housing policy.”

Though SPUR has not yet taken a position on the San Francisco Empty Home Tax ballot measure, Karlinsky said such measures are likely to have less of a direct impact on prices but could still help discourage speculation if “well-crafted.”

Part of the challenge for voters will be understanding the scope of the problem, since calculating vacancy isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. Earlier this year, San Francisco’s Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office prepared a vacancy report at Preston’s request using 2019 Census data. It identified 40,458 vacant homes — about 10% of the city’s total number of homes — including temporary reasons like more than 7,200 units for rent and 2,400 units that were rented but currently unoccupied.

In the book “Homelessness is a Housing Problem,” the University of Washington researchers contend that San Francisco’s rental vacancy rate was more like 3.9% in 2017, when adjusted to show only vacancies that “a given renter might actually be exposed to.”

“It’s not merely a shortage of low-income housing: It’s an overall housing shortage that matters,” the authors write, highlighting a key divide between tenant advocates like Preston and YIMBY development proponents who favor building more housing of all types.

For opposition already forming to the new vacancy tax measures, however, the issue is less about the roots of the housing crisis and more about private property rights for owners who benefit from the system as-is.

“It’s an invasion of privacy to require every homeowner to certify they were home enough, every year,” opponents at homeowner and business group Santa Cruz Together argue on their website.

In anti-tax talking points being distributed by local Realtors, the group argues that a provision allowing an “audit” during a pending home sale could also “mak(e) it harder to sell a house” — a point that Dawson calls “misinformation,” and which she says pales in comparison to the bigger challenge of keeping teachers, restaurant workers and other lower earners in their communities.

“We live in these really amazing, highly desirable places, and we’ve seen prices just continue to skyrocket,” Dawson said. “What are we going to do about this?”