[teebs]

Many of my friends who are tech workers who've worked at unicorns and tech giants for 5-10 years bought their first homes in SF during the pandemic. I would guess part of the drop in rents is a shift in demand from former renters to new homeowners. Also, there was a general increase in prices across all asset classes during the pandemic that continued to drive prices up. Finally, property prices have actually gone up less in SF than they have in the US as a whole, likely because of the general effect of people moving away - compare the change from January 2020 to today in this chart https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS vs this chart https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/home-values/