As Facebook, Google, and other Bay area tech companies have decided to permanently allow employees to work at home, apartment rents in the area have suddenly plunged.
In June, a typical one-bedroom apartment in the San Francisco area was renting for 9.2 percent less than in June 2019, bringing the average rent to its 2017 level of $3,360.
In Google’s home town of Mountain View, CA, rents dropped nearly 16 percent; Menlo Park, where Facebook is based, saw rents fall 14.1 percent. Rents in the town of Cupertino, Apple’s headquarters, were down 14.3 percent. In Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley, rents shrank 10.8 percent.
In comparison, rents fell an average of 3.6 percent in Los Angeles in June and 0.2 across the U.S. overall.
“Turns out a lot of the online hype about Silicon Valley’s move to remote [work] is … borne out by data,” tweeted Anthemos Georgiades. CEO of Zumper, a San Francisco rental service.
TREND FORECAST: This is old news for Trends Journal subscribers. We had forecast a sharp decline in commercial real estate at the onset of the government lockdown and reports of companies increasing the amount of employees that can work at home.
