You know how you sometimes get a fun idea, try it once, and then just can’t stop? That’s exactly what happened to me with tracking Mission District apartment listings on Craigslist.
It all started in the spring of 2021. I decided to record the number of apartments listed for rent in the Mission District. I made sure to note the total number of listings without any data management. I mean, a lot of the apartments are listed multiple times because property owners want to keep them at the top of the list. Some listings offer only daily or weekly rentals. Some listings aren’t even in the Mission District. I once saw a listing with a photo of the infamous, chain-smoking “Queen of Mean” Leona Helmsley. That one got taken down, but guess what? It popped up again in another listing! She’s in a down cycle today.
Anyway, all the listings are included in my total, no matter how questionable they seem. Edit-free recording made the process simple.
I gathered the gross totals over the past three years and put them in a spreadsheet. The resulting chart is pretty interesting—sometimes baffling—but it is always food for fun speculation. I love speculation. Doesn’t everyone?
So, here’s where you come in. I’m asking all of you to speculate on the recent trend. Conspiracy theories are welcome. Extraterrestrial suppositions are, in my view, the best.
In the past three months, the availability of apartments has dropped by half. The slope of decline was partly because I was in Japan for a month and couldn’t collect data. But still, the number of places for rent has plummeted. What do you think is going on?
My experience with Craigslist, when looking a few years ago, was that many/most of the listings were fake/scams. Perhaps Craigslist figured out a way to clamp down on them?
Maybe landlords are abandoning Craigslist because of all the spam and fraud, and switching to Zillow. Have you checked Zillow data?
Exactly.
The San Francisco Multiple Listing Service now syndicates to Zillow, so when an agent puts a for lease listing on the MLS, Zillow picks it up. And unlike Craigslist, there are pesky rules and discrimination laws which are enforced, cutting way down on the Spam and Scams.
My first guess is that Craigslist tightened its entry criteria.
Second is that landlords have stopped listing on Craigslist.
In short, I believe it’s more likely to be something to do with the listings and the venue than the actual availability of apartments. Anecdotally, the neighborhood just isn’t as crowded as it used to be.
The amount of spam (then vs now) is overstated imo. I see approximately the same amount of spam year in and out. When there are large # of repeats, it’s usually taken down by CL anyways.
The reason listing #’s is down is due to several factors:
1- landlords lowered prices to get units rented, or took some permanently off market, or sold some off as TICs.
2- larger buildings eventually filled up enough, so their multiple units of supply got diminished.
3- late last year the mission started getting cleaned up wrt illegal vendors, as well as homeless camps getting dismantled, so neighborhood image and cleanliness improved.
4- tech start ups are a factor. I see more young techies in the hood again 🙂 And thanks god! Better times ahead for small local landlords who suffered the last four years…time to upgrade lunches from burritos to sushi again!
New Mission Local classifieds have swallowed up market share. Wait, you say there are no Mission Local classifieds? Well, that’s a lost opportunity.
Three apartments are vacant on my floor in the building I live in.
They were vacated last month.
Still not for rent yet.
Not sure why for two.
One us for sale went into escrow, but fell through.
Now being shown again.
Maybe also look at apartments for sale. Or condos. Did that go up?
The precipitous drop looks like a correction for the upward trend in the 9 months preceding it. The drop is aligned with the oscillating annual pattern too and just continues a downward trend since day 1. Maybe craigslist adjusted the expiration-time on some listings?
One possibility is, as Prop 33 has qualified for the ballot, and would repeal Costa Hawkins and allow for draconian New York type rent control, maybe owners are holding units vacant until after Election Day.
Then they should sell the units, why have rental units if you don’t rent them out?
To sell, better to have the units empty, a perverse reality in a rent controlled market. Some owners are waiting to see if prop 33 passes or not.
Also, some owners live in their builds and rent out the other unit(s). In those cases the owners may opt to stay but stop renting out the other unit(s).
Exactly, why is it so hard for people to understand that price controls _always_ reduce supply.
As someone with fixed income, I’m always wondering why people keep saying everyone’s leaving the city but yet the price of how the particularly rent keeps going up and up. I once lived in the Bay Area and think it’s the greatest place to live but the cost of anything just makes it prohibited. God willing I will make it back to the Bay Area Berkeley is my favorite. I like reading articles about the city and other places in the Bay Area. I want to ok photo classes at the city college there in San Francisco I wandered the streets looking for photographs to take in a photojournalism class. That was back in the early seventies one of the best times of my life. There are many people like me that regret leaving the Bay Area because in 1970 and 1971 even 72 cost of living there was not that much different than other places.
SImple: corporate buyers are renting large lots of apartments before they could even be listed. They approach the landlords and swing deals so no ads need to be listed.
Listings have moved to Zillow.
That app for price gouging on rental apartments – RealPage – got in trouble and now the landlords have forgotten how to list apartments without price fixing since they’ve been using them?
I think that new law on security deposits being limited to one month’s rent took effect July 1st. I wonder if there is any relation between the two.
While there has been a new influx of chatbot coder kidz in the hood, the current AI wave seems much smaller than any of the previous programmer pilgrimages, so that can’t explain all of the reduction in CL listings.
There’s always been a lot of spam in the CL listings. As long as there’s a long line for open houses, as in the boom/bubble times, agents and landlords can’t be bothered about the spam. When the lines shorten or disappear altogether, it makes sense for agents and LLs to flag spam in order to reduce prospective renters’ bargaining power (two hundred listings is a lot less persuasive than seven hundred listings), and to make their own listings easier to find. Likewise, it’s in prospective renters’ interest to flag spam in boom/bubble times, in order to reduce agents’ and landlords’ bargaining power, but few bother with this, and in any case, it’s no longer their concern once they’ve rented. Agents and LLs continually look at the listings, as it’s their job, so they’re there to manicure the spam on a daily basis when it suits their interests.
If by “conspiracy theory,” you mean “collusion” as defined by the Justice Dept, another factor might be the RealPage price- and inventory-fixing algorithm, for which the Justice Dept is prepapring to prosecute YieldStar. Btw, the FTC recently used the word “conspirators” four times in a press release wrt to the real estate price-fixing algorithm industry. Unless your intent is to smear the FTC, the preemptive extraterrestrial gaslighting might be better directed elsewhere, like perhaps at the perpetrators of downward class war instead of the objects thereof at the bottom.
Also, perhaps CL is simply using better spam-detection so that bogus listings don’t get posted to begin with.
As for the Leona Helmsly posting, I have no idea what you’re talking about, really, and in any case, you apparently didn’t read it or you’d have seen the mention of the price- and inventory-fixing algorithms that might account for some of the reduction in listings.😁
psst… word is FB Marketplace is crushing CL