Greetings to all.
 
Prompt the best online shop on sale of Books.

it clearly indicates that landlords tend not to advertise places to rent during the thanksgiving and xmas holidays too... there are huge dips in both years for those weeks in an otherwise unbroken climb.

negative, witty, and yet so humble! :)

The cost is what's scaring us right now. It seems like twice the cost of living in Chicago, which is where we met and lived for six years (we're now in another midwestern city I'd rather not mention).

If I can find gainful employment, we might be able to swing it. I know I'd love it -- I visited there many times -- but I also love money. Or, at least not having so much of mine go to credit card companies, etc.

Negative... but witty :)

There is work out here. Certainly not as much as there once was. To get an idea you can view the job postings on craigslist. While apartment availability has gone up, job listings have gone down. From my perspective (and again, this is one person only), it's fairly hard to find technology related employment.

Things around here are... re-figuring themselves out. Having gone through such a huge boom and crash, as well as some political based economic... um... mishaps, things are just re-figuring themselves out.

I do love it here. This is home to me. You would probably like it here too, It is a great place to live. It's just a little expensive right now.

THEY'RE ALL MOVING TO NEW YORK (where it is nigh on impossible to find an apartment to buy that isn't a $500,000 matchbox)!

eos -- very negative. care to share more details?

the only thing keeping us from doing it is my ability (or inability) to find steady, well-paying employment.

Mac guy, PC guy, Computer illiterate guy... doesn't make much difference. Can you flip burgers? Too bad, we don't need any of those either.

This is one man's opinion. I can't speak for the entire area.

So how bad is the economy out there? My fiancee's company is mulling over moving us out there for a position that may be opening soon.

We love the area, but we're not sure I'll be able to find a job easily (I'm a Mac guy).

We've heard everything about the job market in the SF area, from "the locusts just left, and the frogs are coming" to "if you look hard enough, you'll find a good job" ...

Is this the right forum to ask, even?

A year or so ago I asked Craigslist about the increase in listings normalized to their own increase in popularity. They replied that the listing growth outstripped their normal site growth. Of course you could make the case that growth of popularity of the real estate section outstripped the blended growth rate as well, but hard to tell without more data.

The Noe Valley Voice prints a snapshot comparison of current rents asked via renttech versus 12 mths ago (http://www.noevalleyvoice.com/2003/July-August/Cost.html). Again, lots of noise in the system but the past two years have shown some substantial declines. I also figure that actual paid rents are $50-100 less than ask.

I'm sure Craig has those usage stats somewhere, but I'm not sure you could directly correlate page views to properties. FWIW, my experience is that about the same number of properties I saw in SF were dual-listed on CL and my pay services for the last 2-3 years (haven't looked in almost a year, though; happy in Berkeley).

What really skews things on CL is that an owner will multiple post at some arbitrary frequency if the property doesn't immediately sell. So it's not the nubmer of properties I see there, but how long the same few properties (with annoying spamming owners) have been vacant. Those tend to be the ones where the owner just doesn't get the message to lower their rent.

That's the other metric I'd love to see. For the same proprties or per neighborhoods tracked on CL, how fast do the rents drop over time... If the owners effectively collude on rents, we can possibly counter that by publishing our own stats on what the average rents per area should be...

If you drive around San Francisco, you will notice that the trends shown in the graph seem to follow the trends shown in "For Rent" signs hanging in windows.

roadknight "'cause they know the minute they do, it will force a domino effect"

The problem isn't a domino effect. The problem is that SF has rent controll. A landlord can only raise the rent of a current tennent by 8% annualy. These goons are all afraid that if they lower their asking rent to get tennents in now, the boom (or a boom) will come back and they will all be stuck getting a measly 1k for a tiny studio when then "should be" getting 1.5k+ in a few years.

Jkottke hit the nail on the head. This graph means little. We don't know if it shows a trend in housing, or a trend in the popularity of craigslist among landlords.

...but still not enough to really cause rents to drop. Our landpers still want $1200/month for the other units around here when they should actually be going for about $800.
Nobody has REALLY cut rents around here 'cause they know the minute they do, it will force a domino effect.

I'd say most of the carpet-baggers and hangers-on cleared out last year sometime. Things are slowly waking up around here in a sort of morning-after-I-guess-I-probably-WON'T-die-after-all-damn-this-means-I-have-to-actually-get-to-work-then
kind of hangover.

But I wonder how much of that graph depicts the overall popularity of craigslist. It'd be nice to see a graph where the housing postings were compared to craiglist traffic or the # of total postings.

That's the way the bubble pops.

and a reflection of a nice, unhealthy economy as people who can't find jobs are moving away...