pyoung

  1. The housing market is very thinly traded, illiquid market. Additionally there are some mechanisms in place that slow down price discovery on the way up (appraisal contingences based on comps), which slows down price discovery. This means it can take a few years to reach an equilibrium, which in a competitive market is roughly equal to the average mortgage that a pool of buyers can qualify for. This effect can result in a steady stream of year-over-year price gains, which often gets interpreted as "housing only goes up", when in reality, it is just the market adjusting to a small pool of buyers.
  2. The bay area has a large contingency of high earning tech employees, large enough to entirely drive the housing market on their own, at least in the short term. This pool of buyers emerged about a decade ago, and have been increasing in numbers since then, at least until recently.
  3. Incomes are not normally distributed, there is a bimodal distribution with the tech employees occupying one of the modals, and the rest of the population occupying the other[1]. Stats on this are difficult because the census tops out at $250k, but very roughly the top 5% average ~$560k, the top 20% average $315k, and the 80th percentile HH income is $176k. Medians would be preferred here, but I think you get the picture. By the time you get down to the 80th percentile, those folks are largely priced out of the market unless they go for a cheap condo or combine households. It is the top 5-10% of HH income earners that are driving the Bay Area market.
  4. Baby boomers own about 40% of houses and have been the largest cohort of home buyers as of late. Boomers have been hanging onto, and even acquiring more homes abnormally late into their lives. I suspect this is most likely due to the booming housing and stock markets keeping a certain segment of boomers very flush with cash. But father time is going to start reversing this trend soon, and I wouldn't be surprised if a market crash forced a number of boomers to start selling sooner rather than later to keep retirement accounts whole, or even if "higher-for-longer" interest rates entice boomers to start moving assets into safer investments. But the point is, boomers are the largest participants in the market, and they are going to be moving from net buyers to net sellers very soon.
  5. It seems like the tech wave has peaked and we have now entered the era of cost cutting. High salary FAANG jobs are harder to come by, and those same companies seem to be looking to move jobs elsewhere to save money. There will still be plenty of highly paid engineers in the Bay, but I suspect those numbers will slowly decline relative to the rest of the bay area.
  6. Prop 13 has distorted the rental market considerably. A lot of landlords purchased their properties in 70's, 80's and 90's. These properties are have miniscule mortgages (if any) and pay barely any property tax. If you bought in the last ten years or so, you are mostly likely going to negative cash flow if you try to rent your property. Hardly worth it, especially when you can sell and put that money in T-Bills and make ~5%.
  7. Despite the above distortions, median rents are roughly in line with median incomes for an HCOL area. i.e. The median rent is approximately equivalent to 30% AGI of the 60-70th percentile household income. That is not to say that rents are cheap or affordable, or that they can't go higher. It is just that they seem to be inline with what the market can bear. If the median landlord renting the median rental tries to price higher, they will push up against the glut of luxury rentals on the market, and if they price lower, they will probably find a large number of lower income folks living with roommates willing to make the jump to their own place. Barring any sudden major population changes, the rental market will probably track inflation for the near term.
  8. And a bit of curveball here, but a law was recently passed that changes Prop 13 so that the property tax basis is no longer allowed to be passed down to heirs. This is likely going to result in a much larger share of homes getting sold (rather than stay as rentals) in the near future.
  9. At least in the short term, population increases seem to be in the 5k range. Meanwhile ~20k new housing units were created. The +/- population numbers can change pretty quickly, but at least in the short term, we are adding more housing units than we are people. And keep in mind, the population changes are in terms of number of people, not number of households. So if an average household has three people, adding 20k housing units would support a population growth of 60k people.