There are few things as frustrating as looking for an apartment that checks all the boxes. If it’s affordable, it’s dark and gloomy. If it’s in a good location, it has mold in the bathroom. And if, by some stroke of luck, it’s perfect, then without a doubt someone else will beat you to it.
In the North Bay/San Francisco Peninsula, apartments stay vacant for 44 days, on average, and each vacant unit attracts around seven prospective renters, the report says. In the East Bay, apartments stay vacant for about 43 days, and such units attract around nine prospective renters. For apartment hunters, occupancy rates matter, because they signal availability. The occupancy rate is 92.9% in the North Bay/San Francisco Peninsula, 94.1% in the East Bay and 95.6% in Silicon Valley. The national average is 94%. New apartments make up a tiny fraction of the market — 0.4% in the North Bay/San Francisco Peninsula and 0.49% in the East Bay — and an even smaller slice in Silicon Valley, where new construction accounts for only 0.16% of the market, the report says.
“Finding a good, affordable apartment in a pleasant neighborhood here is hard,” Svanoe said. “The first place we liked, they took someone else’s bid. Even the apartment we finally got, they had lots of other people coming in to see it. Had we not signed up as quickly as we did, we wouldn’t have got it.”