Basic rule in real waste investing. Don’t wait to buy RE. Buy RE and wait. The rest is immaterial
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When you look at stocks invest or similar kind of view, margin of safety is valid point. If you buy at low point, such as 2008-2011, it is additional bonus.
But SFBA has inherited basic margin of safety by strong tech, bio-tech, financial industry.
This makes it easy to have blind purchase on good locations at any time.
True, I realized it as my recent home purchase (2018) came to the same level I bought. Now, remodel adds more value, potential gain is already embedded as this in good school (all three schools walk-able distance, no need of bike/car commute to schools) and 4 miles south of new google complex !
I do not know if this article was shared on this forum.
Links real estate prices to IPO.
At any given night in California, everyone goes somewhere to sleep. So there is indeed enough accommodation to house everyone except homeless but that number is small enough that it’s statistically insignificant. So if this is the definition of no housing shortage, then I agree with you there is no housing shortage. There is no housing shortage in present-day California, and there has never been any housing shortage in California’s history, and basically there has been any housing shortage anywhere in the world since the beginning of time. And since in the long run everyone dies, shortage or no shortage, it means nothing. So everything is irrelevant and nothing means anything. The only thing worth discussing is probably that the universe is forever. But we already know that, don’t we? 
The kind of housing shortage I had in mind is more inline with what you said about paying Fresno price for a Palo Alto house. Not to that extreme but similar concept. But I think we are already in violent agreement on that one, and it seems that you are more interested in discussing pure theories so I see no need to push this further.
Over 30% of the entire land mass of the greater Bay Area is off limits to any building. Open Space Districts keep buying up more. And in those places where you can still build the process is outlandish. That’s the manufactured shortage. That desert getaway I put in took 4 months from sitting down with the builder to getting handed the keys. Total county fees were $2500. If the Bay Area was like that there would be no housing shortage. In the Bay Area good luck just putting in a granny unit. If every tenant was evicted from every illegal dwelling the UN would have to be called in. The refugee crisis would be international news, swamping anything happening in the Middle East.
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First of all, foreign buyers and the very wealthy often use LLCs to purchase homes anonymously.
Recalled I mentioned LLCs tend to invite predatory lawsuits.
The top five make sense: Google, Apple, Salesforce, Facebook, LinkedIn. What’s missing from the top of the list are all the soon-to-IPO San Francisco companies.
Don’t contradict @manch. He thinks startups are the main demand and driving up the price. So all those moves made by these bigwigs to elsewhere won’t matter.
A lot of software developers, according to an unprecedented new analysis.
How many own 2+ houses?
That author is mental. I’m sure she’d prefer the government own all housing and assign it to us based on a scale of wokeness, and everyone is charged based on percent of income.
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I do not know if you meant this but sounds like selling a Palo Alto home at Fresno prices will satisfy your complain of housing shortages. Or else, how do you want to solve the “housing crisis” or the “housing shortage” that you believe exists. Should we sell Palo Alto home at Fresno prices through government fiat as someone else suggested ? Or degrade the Palo Alto homes (by dividing them to the level that just a room and a attached bath is sold as a unit. Remove motor parking, remove parks and gardens, and narrow the streets to 6 feet, build 50 floors apartment towers, or something else) to the level that they sell at Fresno Home prices? What exactly do you have in mind to solve the “housing crisis” ?
Another definition,
Real estate industry likes to use 6 months inventory as a balanced market. So less than 6 months is shortage, more than 6 months is ample supply.
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My reading comprehension is poor. I am unable to make out what the author is trying to say. But, the following lines caught my attention.
Kat Carroll, an agent with Compass Real Estate, works in San Francisco and the peninsula that contains Silicon Valley. “The peninsula, though we’ve had a strong spring, does not have the same kind of frenzied energy,” she says. “I don’t think the IPOs are going to affect down there ( @pandeyathotmail – south bay cities and other far off places ) the way they might in San Francisco.”
The most comprehensive academic study of the effects of IPOs on local housing prices, which studied every IPO from 1993 to 2017, found that prices within 10 miles of a company’s headquarters rose just 1.8 percent in the run-up to and aftermath of the public debuts relative to surrounding areas.
So, IPOs only result in 1.8% price appreciation in the neighborhood where the company operates from?
The failure of SB50 is bullish for real estate speculators. Despite all the BS, politicians have no desire to solve the housing crisis or make housing affordable. I have been betting on this since 1976. Way better ROI than being a Tesla bull.
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is this not a sign of a healthy market? For similar metrics in retail, we will be looking at DSO ( Day Sales Outstanding). What about the terms like DOM so frequently used in the real estate business?
To me looks like SFBA homes are priced right, that is why they are going away quick. If they were priced higher or astronomical as the “housing shortage” people would have you believe, they would be sitting in the market forever.
No one has yet defined what the housing crisis is. You do not solve something that is not a problem in the first place. All talk of solving the “housing shortage” sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
Since you are learned in Chinese literature, I am sure you know this phrase:
近水樓台先得月
One who’s close to the kitchen gets the food first. And I may add gets the biggest and most yummy food first.
Sierra Club is an elitists hiking club that considers humans a virus that should be eliminated
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So they are terrorists?
Have been defined many times. You are looking at the wrong place.
Housing crisis is it is no longer affordable to people like teachers, plumbers, firemen, police… That is why the solution is low cost housing for these guys. Those still around are staying very far (also bad commuting, not just take a long time) from SV or not so good. This drives up prices of such services and hard to get things done. 2nd issue is tech companies have to pay big barks for out-of-state SWEs to come to SV, to compensate for the high cost of living and high rentals/ prices of houses. Even so, many don’t want to come, leading to poaching of employees from each other.
You got fooled. No can do. More practical to stay on the ground.