DC Real Estate Versus the Facebook Effect

• May 22, 2012

by Shilpi Paul

Rowhouses in San Francisco

It is no secret that housing prices are prohibitively high in San Francisco, and with the recent creation of several thousand new Facebook millionaires, prices are set to shoot up even more.

Yesterday, Trulia’s Jed Kolko took a look at the “Facebook Metropolitan Area” — the area within a ten-mile radius of Facebook’s campus — and found that average home prices and rents are increasing at an even faster rate than in San Francisco proper. While rents increased by about 10 percent since last year in all of the San Francisco bay area, they increased by 12 percent in the Facebook Metro Area. Asking home prices also increased 1.4 percent in the area around the Facebook campus. Kolko noted that a limited area for new development and the influx of wealth will probably keep prices on the rise in the greater San Francisco area for a while:

As Facebook’s flush owners realize their gains, there’ll be even more money chasing real estate in the Facebook metro area and in the San Francisco Bay Area generally. This new wealth should push up prices more than rents since many of Facebook’s employees will make the move to homeownership.

To see how prices in San Francisco compare to DC, we got some help from a San Francisco-based friend who works in the real estate industry and has lived in both cities to help us find neighborhoods that felt similar to one another. We used Trulia’s Heat Maps for DC and San Francisco to see how home prices compared. Trulia’s data was based on home sales from February to April of this year. We used rentometer to determine average rents for two-bedroom apartments in both cities.

The findings were interesting; home prices are significantly higher in comparable neighborhoods in San Francisco, but rents seem to be about the same. We wonder if rentometer is a little outdated and hasn’t take in new data since San Fran’s huge rent increase in the past year; a quick look at livelovely.com seems to show that rents for two-bedrooms in Noe Valley are reaching into the mid-$3,000’s, for example.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/dc_real_estate_versus_the_facebook_effect/5566