San Francisco housing market near bubble risk according to UBS report. Majority of Bay Area renters plan to leave.

The San Francisco housing market is the most overvalued market in the United States. People over inflate the market because tech is sexy and cool and many are chasing the next Google, Amazon, or Facebook. Everyone wants to strike it rich with as little work as possible. And what better way to do that than in real estate? In San Francisco the typical crap shack will cost you $1.2 to $1.5 million. The response from many housing cheerleaders is the typical logic you see in manias – hey, someone paid for it! You also get similar stories from the tulip bubble, dotcom bubble, and other bubbles where the justification for higher prices is simply that some other sucker paid for it at that level. And there is now signs that we may be in a rental bubble in the Bay Area. 83 percent of renters surveyed in the Bay Area said they plan on leaving. Tie that in with the UBS Global Real Estate Index showing that San Francisco is dangerously close to bubble territory and you have indicators that something is rotten in SF.
Riding the tech wave
Some people understand the business cycle and the waves that ripple through our economy. The housing market and economy has been booming since 2009. People forget that recessions happen. And now that we have added millions of renter households with higher rents, what happens when that next correction hits? While you can sit in a home and let it flow into foreclosure like many did during the housing crisis, there is a smaller window for renters should cash flow issues occur.

This post was published at Doctor Housing Bubble on November 16th, 2017.