San Francisco Rents Surpass Pre-Pandemic Prices

The post-pandemic recovery of rental prices in San Francisco is gaining steam with more data to back up claims of a complete bounceback.

A typical one-bedroom apartment in the city now rents for more than it did before the pandemic, while two-bedrooms are purportedly the most expensive they’ve ever been, the San Francisco Business Times reported, citing a new report from Zumper.

In September, the median rent of a one-bedroom was $3,520, surpassing the pre-pandemic median of $3,500 for the first time. Meanwhile, the median rent for a two-bedroom climbed up to $5,000, a record for Zumper’s reports which started tracking rents in 2016.

Year over year, San Francisco topped the list for rent growth for a two-bedroom apartment, up 17.1 percent from last year. One-bedroom rent prices in the city were up 10.7 percent year-over-year, the third-highest increase nationally.

“The AI boom has brought an influx of high-paying jobs and investor activity back to San Francisco, fueling housing demand in a city where supply has long been constrained,” Zumper spokesperson Crystal Chen told the Business Times. “Combined with generally stricter return-to-office policies, it’s not entirely surprising that the one-bedroom rent hit its pre-pandemic benchmark this year.”

It’s only a matter of time before median prices for a one-bedroom surpass the pre-pandemic record of $3,720 from June 2019. The city could leave its pre-pandemic records in the dust next year, Chen said, citing heightened renter demand and limited new housing supply as possible drivers of price increases.

San Francisco’s rising rents are in stark contrast to nationwide trends. Rents across much of the country have either fallen or remained flat for the past three months, according to Zumper’s National Rent Index.

Meanwhile, as rents across San Francisco grow, home prices are trending in the opposite direction. They’ve dropped to 2018 levels, according to the Business Times. Still, high home prices and mortgage rates as well as increasing insurance premiums have forced potential buyers to settle on renting for now.

— Chris Malone Méndez