Bay Area rents are approaching pre-pandemic levels at last.
San Mateo rents are 17 percent above February 2021, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, citing data from Apartment List. Landlords are asking $2,370 for a one-bedroom and $3,220 for two.
In San Francisco, one-bedrooms are going for a median of $2,340 and two-bedrooms for $2,710, a 16 percent increase. Rents are up 15 percent in Union City and 13 percent in Berkeley and Redwood City.
“We’re really kind of officially in the beginning of the busy rental season,” Rob Warnock, a San Francisco-based senior research associate at Apartment List, told the Chronicle. “The sort of desperation that property managers had to fill vacant units, that’s probably, if not already gone, on its way out.”
The Bay Area is the only major metro whose rents have yet to recover from the pandemic. San Francisco and San Jose are still about 5 percent below March 2020.
The pre-Covid Bay Area rental market was among the priciest in the nation. Only this past year did New York City overtake San Francisco as the most expensive city for renters, a title it had held since apartment listing site Zumper began collecting data.
in 2014.
Some parts of the Bay Area that were hit hard by the pandemic are rebounding. Leases are on the uptick in Central Market Street, for example, where rows of shuttered stores stand testament to the fallout from the escape from office life.
[San Francisco Chronicle] — Gabriel Poblete
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