Tralane Cardona arrived in San Francisco on Jan. 12, ready to start a new job at Aramark, a food concession company.
After apartment-hunting virtually from Houston, Texas, she thought she had a place lined up and ready to go: an apartment near Oracle Park, where she works.
When she arrived, however, she discovered that the landlord had decided to rent to someone else. She quickly pivoted, and stayed in an Airbnb in Brisbane while looking for a permanent place to live.
That limbo lasted five weeks. Finally, on Feb. 19, she moved into an apartment — not in San Francisco, but in Daly City, a 15-minute drive from her workplace.
The hunt, she said, was more than a little stressful. She searched for apartments near the stadium in San Francisco proper, but the costs were too high for what she wanted.
“Moving here from out of state,” she said, “especially if you’ve never been here, can be frustrating and daunting.”
Few people who have looked for an apartment in San Francisco in the last quarter-century would describe the process as easy. But right now, times seem to be especially tough.
Pete Rodway, a real-estate agent for residential real-estate firm Compass, said the market is notably hotter than it was even six months ago.
“We weren’t really seeing as much AI funding coming in. But now, we’ve seen a huge boom of AI buyers that are really pushing the market up,” he said. “It certainly feels like the rental market is tighter than it’s been in a long time.”
The average monthly rent for a 579-square-foot apartment — a typical one bedroom, one bathroom — is around $3,745 per month, up by 13 percent from last year, and higher than around 97 percent of the national median.
Roughly 59 percent of San Francisco renters pay more than $3,000 monthly. It’s not clear how much of this increase is directly attributable to the AI industry, but it’s safe to say that the job sector with the largest growth in San Francisco is at least somewhat responsible for rising costs.
George Lipp, a contributor to Mission Local and longtime Mission resident, created a database to track Mission rental listings posted to Craigslist since April 2021. He has noticed a sharp decline in availability starting in early 2024.
“I’ve never seen fewer places available,” Lipp said.
Gabriel, a student at San Francisco State University, was crashing at his friend’s place while he looked for his own apartment after returning from a study abroad program in Spain. He said he applied to dozens of places.
“I wasn’t getting anything,” he said. He had pretty much given up hope when he had a stroke of luck: His girlfriend’s brother knew some real-estate agents in the city.
“This guy said he only had one more room left,” he said. He got it. “I don’t even know what I’d be doing right now.”
Although consulting real-estate agents for apartment hunting may have been uncommon in the past, the competitive and chaotic market in San Francisco has created a need for guidance from those most familiar with the market.
Gabriel is paying $875 a month to live with four roommates in Crocker-Amazon. He makes around $1,300 a month working a part-time job, with rent taking up a significant chunk of his monthly salary: 67 percent.
Rodway, who has been a real-estate agent in San Francisco for 10 years, said it is basically an issue of a lot of demand and not enough supply.
“Renters and purchasers are all scrambling for a limited inventory,” he said. “San Francisco is a tight inventory city. It’s a limited geography,” he said. “If someone sees a property that came onto Zillow today, and they say, ‘I’m interested,’ it could be gone in three days.”
The scramble, from renters and real-estate agents, results in a stressful and confusing experience, driving some, like Cardona, out of the city proper. But no matter the hustle, there continue to be renters determined to stick it out.
Lucas Vargas Zeppetello is currently renting in Oakland and is looking to move to the city. He grew up in the Richmond District, but moved out of state for school, returning to the Bay Area in 2024 to take up a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management.
Vargas Zeppetello knows finding a place will be hard, but he says it’s worth it.
“I feel, more than I have felt elsewhere, that the people I know from San Francisco have this incredible pride of place,” he said. “People really value being from the city. It’s something that actually means something to people.”