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SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — Add the San Francisco Bay Area’s once red-hot real estate market to restaurants, cafes, music venues and local businesses that have been dramatically impacted by the coronavirus outbreak.

According to a report from the residential brokerage firm Compass, new listings have taken a dramatic tumble over the last month and dozens of homes have simply been taken off the market.

San Francisco saw 250 active listings taken off the market in the last three weeks, the San Francisco Business Times reported quoting the study. In comparison during the week of March 16, just 16 active listings were removed.

Compass analyst Patrick Carlisle found that Alameda County saw its number of active listings pulled from the market go from 32 to 135 over the same time span. In San Mateo County the numbers were 18 to 100 and Santa Clara — the hardest hit county in the Bay Area by the virus — saw an increase from 54 to 196.

Carlisle’s numbers showed that luxury homes — properties over $2.5 million — were among the most dramatically impacted. His figures showed that more than 900 luxury home listings were removed from the market in the Bay Area in the week beginning March 16.

“Generally speaking, when financial markets go screwy, it is the most affluent households who are likely to become more cautious and step back quickly,” he told the Business Times.

Article source: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/04/03/coronavirus-outbreak-having-chilling-effect-on-san-francisco-bay-areas-real-estate-market/

In the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak in the Bay Area, San Francisco’s home sales inventory have nearly vanished.

In the weeks since Bay Area counties began following shelter-in-place orders, the number of new homes appearing on the multiple listing service (MLS) during what is typically one of the region’s busiest periods is shockingly small, with a great number of once-listed properties disappearing around the same time. The market melted away in a matter of weeks or, by some metrics, days.

Compass Real Estate reports that the rate of new listings in San Francisco fell off a cliff in mid-March, dropping to less than 20 per week by the end of the month. The number of active listings nosedived from roughly 1,000 at the start of March down to just 550 three weeks later. And the number of listings pulled off the market increased more than tenfold in just a single week between March 9 and March 16.

Jeff Tucker, economist for the real estate listing site Zillow, tells Curbed SF that on March 16, the day that six Bay Area counties, including San Francisco announced shelter-in-place orders, SF-centric traffic on the site dropped by one-third. Since then it’s risen slightly, but still down 20 percent year over year last weekend.

A similar trend can be found on the other side of the bay. Red Oak Realty CEO Vanessa Bergmark, who calls the last three weeks “grim,” says that the East Bay saw only 55 new listings last week, a decline of 70 percent compared to mid-March. The East Bay (including Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda) showed 374 homes listed last week, down 37 percent year over year.

Lending markets are actually quite busy these days, but the biggest mover isn’t mortgages but refinance requests. Finance site that refinances are up 417 percent year over year in SF, the highest rate in the country. San Jose came in third nationally with 394 percent.

Compass analyst Patrick Carlisle points out that early spring is usually the busy buying season, but the public health emergency has chopped it off seemingly at the roots.

“It is unknown what the ultimate effects will be over the longer term,” he cautions, pointing out that longer-term benchmarks like median prices won’t be affected for months. But right now there’s essentially nothing by way of encouraging signs.

Nevertheless, some real estate agents are sticking with the principles of salesmanship and continuing to tout what they say is the strength of the SF home market, even as it contracts.

Marco Carvajal, a realtor with Vanguard SF, says that with inventory down 40 percent in three weeks and the stock market disintegrating, “In almost every other city this would lead to buyers climbing under the nearest rock.”

Despite the downturn, he persists that the appeal of SF real estate remains a strong motivator, reporting anecdotally that more homes have shied away from the MLS and are instead trading hands privately. If a chance to buy the kind of home that only comes along every ten or 20 years pops up, “the time is now,” he says.

Wilson Leung, owner of Own Real Estate, tells Curbed SF, “People do want to sell, in any market,” and predicts that current declines represent uncertainty about shelter-in-place orders rather than loss of faith in real estate.

“I anticipate inventory will spike once the shelter is over,” he adds.

Zillow’s Jeff Tucker concurs, noting that a lot of missing listings are likely from people afraid of having a property linger on the market without buyers right now and hurting their long-term prospects, or of having a sale potentially fall apart because of economic uncertainty.

“It never looks good to have a sale fall through,” says Tucker. Although the current circumstances could provide some charity about sales snafus, in the end “it’s still adding some risk.”

Questions about how strong SF’s real estate market is right now might be moot, given that it’s unclear whether Realtors are even allowed to perform basic tasks of selling homes. For weeks, shelter-in-place orders have precluded agents from giving tours, taking photos, or visiting listed properties.

Over the weekend, the federal Department of Homeland Security released an advisory designating both residential and commercial real estate as “essential businesses” during the public health crisis. California Gov. Gavin Newsom concurred.

However, local health ordinances, like the one in San Francisco, still do not permit real estate businesses to do anything except work from home, and it’s unclear which set of orders takes precedent. As with all other things, uncertainty is very much the zeitgeist right now.

Article source: https://sf.curbed.com/2020/4/2/21201592/sf-housing-homes-inventory-coronavirus-covid-19

The novel coronavirus outbreak has turned everything about living in San Francisco upside down. Will the crisis also upend the most expensive rental market in the country?

In January, the median market price for a one-bedroom in the city on some platforms was $3,500. It would be awful irony for market rent prices in SF to significantly plunge at a time when most renters weren’t primed to take advantage of it—but that inability to pay is precisely what would drive any price depression.

“If unemployment soars, especially if it’s hitting younger people in their 20s and early 30s hard, [...] rents will probably be hit quite hard,” says Patrick Carlisle, an analyst with Compass Real Estate.

Carlisle tells Curbed SF that younger workers who arrived recently in SF in search of high-paying jobs may “pull up stakes” and relocate in the face of joblessness and still-soaring rents. He compares this scenario to the bursting of the dot-com bubble 20 years ago, after which rents dropped quickly and dramatically as landlords had to chase after new renters with far less cash on hand.

Since that was a different time and a different crisis, he cautions that it’s too soon to tell if history will repeat itself. But it’s certainly not an implausible scenario.

SF-based data scientist Jay Feng offers a similar hypothesis, telling Curbed SF that “the amount of people moving out of the city will supersede the number of people moving in” and increase rental supply the hard way, concurring with Carlisle’s suggestion that layoffs and furloughs will push workers out of SF in such volumes that rent prices will have to fall.

On the other hand, Wolf Richter, finance writer for Wolf Street, tells Curbed SF that the current circumstances are perhaps too unusual for making accurate market predictions. Shelter-in-place orders are a difficult variable to account for; he suggests that it’s hard to know what the renting market will look like when people are free to move about and businesses can reopen.

Nevertheless, he admits, “I don’t see any reason for there to be upward pressure on the rental market.”

Noting the mass layoffs and job loss affecting the area, he wonders, “Are these people going to stick it out until a new job emerges, or are they going to leave and return to Mom and Dad or whatever?”

Anthemos Georgiades, CEO of the rental site Zumper, notes that his site’s search traffic is down 30 percent, and inventory on Zumper recently dropped 12 percent week over week, either because landlords aren’t able to show homes or because tenants who previously planned to vacate are no longer in a position to move. [Correction: Georgiades actually said that search traffic for SF homes generally is down 30 percent, not specifically on Zumper.]

“Rents will most likely feel downward pressure the next few months as people pause their moves and apartment complexes may offer more specials/rebates that will contribute to lower prices,” he tells Curbed SF.

Georgiades warns that the effects of the outbreak could be elastic and likely to return to the old status quo quickly once people feel the outbreak has ebbed.

Chris Salviati, economist for Apartment List, says that he too expects to see people moving less frequently in the coming months, citing eviction moratoriums and “general uncertainty.” He suggests that even a short-term dip could push landlords to cut prices in hopes that the appearance of a bargain will lure anxious renters.

“But given the temporary and uncertain nature of the present situation, it’s also possible that they might hold out on lowering asking rents until things have settled down,” Salviati adds, saying that if a great many people delay moving now and then take the bait all at once, that surge could wipe out any potential for significant declines.

He suggests a possibly tiered response in which prices on the most expensive rental listings drop while cheaper units get more competitive, as stock market woes and looming recessions push renters down the economic ladder.

But Sam Radbil, spokesperson for rental site Abodo, tells Curbed SF that while it’s too early to say for sure, “We don’t foresee a massive drop in rent prices in any major city, even those hit hard by the coronavirus.”

Small decreases are likely in the short-term—in fact, he says Abodo has already seen some prices falling—but “it will take a huge lack of interest from renters, over the course of a few months, to significantly push down rent prices in SF and other major cities.”

Ultimately, the crux of the question rests on how broadly the outbreak changes San Francisco. If life returns to normal in a few months, then that normal will likely include the same rent crush of the past decade.

Changing that trend would mean changing something fundamental about renting But this is the first time in well over a decade that such a thing has seemed truly—perhaps imminently—possible.

Article source: https://sf.curbed.com/2020/4/1/21196772/sf-rent-prices-coronavirus-outbreak-covid-19-prices-fall

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  The downturn in the local rent market in response to the coronavirus, according to RentCafe.

  The downturn in the local rent market in response to the coronavirus, according to RentCafe.

  
  Photo: RentCafe
  

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The downturn in the local rent market in response to the coronavirus, according to RentCafe.

The downturn in the local rent market in response to the coronavirus, according to RentCafe.

Photo: RentCafe

Normally, spring is a busy time for the Bay Area rental market. But with a state-wide shelter-in-place order ongoing and coronavirus cases still rising, that market is taking a hit — a trend that’s growing across the nation.

According to national rent site RentCafe, by the second week of March, 30 percent fewer renters in the Bay Area were searching for an apartment.

The biggest drop so far was recorded on March 16, “when the number of visits decreased by 45 percent compared to one week prior,” Adrian Rosenberg, a RentCafe spokesperson, told SFGate. “Mirroring the national trend, searches on Google such as as ‘apartments’ or ‘apartments near me’ have dropped significantly.”

This doesn’t mean people have given up, however. Those who were already in the process of securing an apartment have remained optimistic about their future move, at least according to a recent RentCafe survey. “We wanted to see what they think about the possibility of the outbreak affecting their moving plans, and to do that, we surveyed 6,000 people,” Rosenburg said.

For 56% of respondents, finding an apartment remains a priority even during these times.  17% renters said they decided not to move, while 8% plan on postponing the moving process.

Almost half of the respondents reported no changes in their renting preferences. However, a notable 28% are considering something more inexpensive than what they looked for initially.

For 49%, the current situation has altered their apartment selection process. 17% now rely on online pictures or virtual tours, while 12% have decided to pick whatever is easiest to speed up the moving process.

Those that must search for an apartment are navigating the new process. Virtual reality tours, a luxury once reserved for home buyers, are now popping up as an option in Bay Area apartment listings. Videos and virtual showings have also increased and a current search for “virtual” in Craigslist San Francisco apartments for rent shows a plethora of offerings advertising virtual tour capacity.

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Local rental buildings are also adapting. At the Essex on Folsom near the Financial District, tours are either virtual or self-guided, by appointment only. Prices haven’t changed much though — a two-bedroom is listed at over $6,000 a month.

In Oakland, The Atlas luxury rental towers has suspended in-person tours, but they’re offering virtual variations, “Our leasing office has gone virtual. As the Coronavirus (COVID-19) situation has evolved, we have made changes to our business practices based on the latest public health recommendations….. [We] are temporarily ceasing all in-person property tours and meetings with prospective residents. Instead, we invite you to use our website to explore our community virtually. You may also call or email our leasing office to set up a virtual visit with one of our leasing professionals.”

Interested renters can virtually walk through an apartment using the leasing agent’s mobile device as their eyes, asking questions of the live person as they go.

Rental sites like Zumper are also coming up with new ways to offer services to their users. “With the current state of affairs amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, real estate open houses for both home sales and rentals have come nearly to a full halt. To support Zumper’s users, both renters and landlords, Zumper has released a new suite of online tour features,” Zumper’s Crystal Chen told SFGate.

Article source: https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/Coronavirus-hurts-bay-area-rental-market-15148654.php

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Swanky-San-Francisco-tennis-club-to-become-15167659.php