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San Francisco Tenants Break Leases at Alarming Rates (thesfnews.com)
81 points by ghaff on June 25, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 58 comments


> The survey revealed that 16 percent of owners reported residents broke their leases or unexpectedly gave a 30-Day Notice to Vacate. > A total of 315 landlords responded to the survey, owning or managing 10,377 residential apartments citywide...

So, 50 landlords (~16% of 315) reported that they had at least one tenant unexpectedly leave early? Over what time period? How many tenants in total? This may or may not be an interesting story - we can't tell.


So it could be as few as 50/10377 = 0.5% of tenants broke their lease. This is a useless survey unless they asked the landlords how many of their tenants broke their lease.


As typical of sensationalist media these days looking to get clicks.


Unfortunately not every survey will meet the high standards of internet commenters looking for blood


I understand why you might feel this way, but I don't think the parent and grandparent comments are necessarily "looking for blood." They bring up valid concerns.

Disclosure: I haven't read the linked article.


Whose blood are commenters looking for by pointing out that the data given in the piece fails to lend any credence to the "alarming rate" claim?


or any standard at all?


Yeah, the statistics are kinda crappy.

What would be more useful is of the 10,377 apartments these landlords represent, how many of those apartments broke their lease?


Not only that but how many break their leases before this pandemic? Also like someone mentioned above over what time period. Over the last week or month or ... what?


16% is not alarming to me given the situation and how ridiculous real estate is in SF. I expected a higher number than that.


It's not even 16% of rentals; it's 16% of the surveyed owners who, on average, rent more than 30 rental units each.


So it could be that of those owners they had one or two tenants break a lease? This would be a much lower number of actual tenants breaking their lease but we do not know with the data provided.


Right. All the provided numbers tell us is that out of about 10 000 renters at least 50 and no more than 9750 broke their lease. We really need to know where in this range the real numbers are and where we'd expect them to be in a normal year.

Before somebody complains about my numbers, I did round values to make the math simpler. The real values aren't that far off.


What is a typical rate? 16% seems Very high to me but I’m not familiar with the market


Annualize it though!


It’s realestate, so let’s seasonally adjusted it too (though maybe they only do this where I live).

Realestate figures always have so many adjustments that I can’t tell what anything means.


The Chronicle had an article citing the same statistics (but with a little more investigation): https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/SF-tenants-brea...


> San Francisco Tenants Break Leases At Alarming Rates

> The survey revealed that 16 percent of owners reported residents broke their leases or unexpectedly gave a 30-Day Notice to Vacate.

An unexpected 30-day notice is how my Bay Area lease terminated gracefully. Like, it was required that I do that, by the contract written by my landlord. But I don't consider graceful, agreed upon move-outs as "breaking" a lease, which to me implies someone trying to get out of the contract.

But also… this would be hardly surprising? My rent was going up 10% YoY when I left, and it was clear that Bay Area politics were never going to fix the rampant housing problems. With all the layoffs I've read about as a result of COVID-19, I bet some people are moving out! (I moved prior to all this craziness.)

One of my co-workers even told me that he had every intention of protecting "his" piece of the pie, as much as possible, by letting as little as possible get built as he could as a voter. It was just amazing to me how so many people thought they had the right to tell other people what they could not do with "their" land. Zoning is one thing, but the Bay Area is a whole different thing.


There is typically a term to a lease, so maybe you were just month to month.


Yes and no — but my point is that any normal termination would have resulted in the 30-days notice. Yes, under a year-long or worse lease, you'd have to wait until the end of the lease period, but you'd still be serving such a notice.

(And in fact, we were on a year-long lease, and first transitioned it to a month-to-month for the purposes of being able to eventually serve that notice.)


Glad to be one of them. We'll see if I make it back to the good ole Bay Area.


Did you move out of bay area completely, or to a place more affordable. Am in cupertino and been thinking should I move or not?


If you can work remotely, I’d recommend it. I did that in summer 2018 and I don’t regret it. Also, it seems that the value of property in the cities adjacent to the focal points of the Bay Area is going up. The value of my house went up 7% while the value of property in the main cities is depreciating.


I'm originally from the Midwest, so I moved back with my parents for a bit of time. Luckily, I'm a massive minimalist so it was easy for me to just pack up and drive across the country without any issues.

I'd like to come back, but my company has consider allowing me to stay here. If it's with the same pay, it would be a no-brainer. But I do love/will miss the Bay Area. I'll probably be back when I'm a bit more financially stable.


> But I do love/will miss the Bay Area. I'll probably be back

I was going to ask, what is an ideal place for you? Like let's say cities lose their allure because clusters of event venues won't exist and nobody has the capacity to meet new people even if watering holes did implement distancing, since everyone is distanced.

As someone that didn't retreat to my parents house and has a new favela in my SF neighborhood amidst all sorts of chaos, I've been drawing a blank for the last 4 months


>what is an ideal place for you?

If I knew, I'd be there :D Unfortunately, I have no idea. I like my family and the cost of living around where I live (Midwest), I love the hustle and bustle of the Northeast, and I like the outdoors and political vibe of the West Coast. Even lived in Germany for a bit in college and loved that.

Open to suggestions, haha


London! I moved to SF from London, you get bit of everything! :)


Tell me more. I’m also in the Midwest US. Still early in my career. I’d consider London but the cost of living scares me. Also the whole Brexit thing.


Don't worry much about Brexit, I was quite worried about it myself and I lost the chance to buy a house at a cheaper price. Brexit is turning out to be quite positive for the UK, and the media claims that the companies will move out is backfiring and they are moving into the UK now.

I have lived in SF / Boston / London / Portland, and I think London has the bits of all. Comparing to the west coast, London has equal or better food culture, similar political vibe but much more diverse yet localized within the city, the hustle and bustle of living in a true city, the architectural beauty and most importantly quite nicely located with accessible sites of natural beauty within the UK and Europe.

I think the only thing that is negative about London vs SF is the weather :-/ Also, it's not a very friendly place to move at the start of your career, quite closed for newbies and an old boys club so that's a caveat.


OK, so the only part I'll respond to is the Brexit thing.

Firstly, Brexit has still not happened in any real sense (there's a transition period till the end of the year).

Secondly, the UK government appear to want a minimal trade relationship with the EU, which will hit services trade pretty hard (and the UK exports lots of services).

The likelihood is that many large companies will need to move staff/assets to the EU to retain their licenses.

For me, specifically (as I'm a data scientist) this probably means that data products out of the UK are going to be tricky to sell.

I would expect that there will be a drop in London property prices, but a larger drop in jobs.

Don't get me wrong, London is a great city, but I (personally) would stay away from moving there till at least next year, as the implications around Brexit and trade should be much clearer by then.


I don't even have any counter arguments to make, you can speculate as much as you want, the home prices were suppose to drop drastically and I was waiting for it. They went up after the withdrawal agreement was signed :-/

I was under impression that whatever you just mentioned would have happened by now, but Nissan and Unilever are now moving to UK and all the speculations are going down the drain.

I have come to a conclusion that all the anti-brexit hysteria has been priced in, and indecisiveness is proving more costly as time goes by!


Totally. I'm in a similar position (wanting to buy a house, but concerned at the insane prices), so I totally get you. Maybe coronavirus will accomplish it. Something something market, irrational, solvent.

So, the Unilever thing is a stock move, that really only occurred because the shareholders in the City didn't like it (being removed from the FTSE would have been very bad for their share price).

My understanding is that Nissan (and all the car-makers) rely on frictionless trade in goods, which probably isn't going to happen. I believe that they will probably invest in the UK for the domestic market, but we'll see.

Again, nothing has practically changed in terms of trade, and will not until January 1st of next year. We'll see I suppose.


Well, that means UK does have a pretty amazing leverage to keep jobs in the country. I am one of the least politically aware person, but I have come to a conclusion that Brexit isn't going to be as good as it is being claimed by people who have voted for it. It's also not going to be as bad as people who voted against it claim to be.

As an outsider, for something as zero-sum as buying a home where supply is low, cost of waiting and indecision can be pretty high.


I would trust this comparison more if it was NYC / Hong Kong / London etc

But yeah I like Europe-area economic and financial centers for proximity to the rest of Europe and they are all centrally located in a diagonal line from London to Dubai.

I wish the US had a similar centrally located clusters, instead of the coasts at the far extremes of the continent.


oh dear, that was a bad rub in :P Yes, SF is always weird and complex to compare to other cities :-/


Asheville, North Carolina


I think there's still a nationwide housing shortage, not just in urban centers. In SF and NYC, this means you get people making six figures with 3 roommates. Moving out doesn't change that there's a shortage, but it spreads it around. Some people will move in with their parents, and some will hopefully keep their coastal salary, move somewhere cheaper, and push lower income people into roommate situations. I'm expecting to hear some low-level gripes across the country about rising housing costs. Nothing like coastal levels, but levels people there might not be used to.


It's already spreading here, unfortunately. Ten years ago, folks in the closest metro area to me used to be able to rent for $500/mo. Now, the equivalent places would be $1200/mo. Buying has gone up even more. It's great to see the place grow and become popular, but its affordability made it so charming and live-able.


This sounds like you live near Ann Arbor, except prices there are even higher than $1200/mo.


Columbus, Ohio (err, Flavortown?). But yeah, same thing. Ann Arbor is wonderful though... completely understand the prices.


Curious if you are leaving a lot of friends behind; or rather, how easy it was to make persistent friends when you arrived in the Bay Area. I find it’s hard to meet people where I live, most of my friends are from school


I definitely am, but I've also had tons of friends leave me behind in the several years I've lived there. It's a transient city––I think everyone kind of just gets that friends there are short-lived. And I keep in contact with folks from a distance.


I agree - my friends have left as well. Visits on holidays is the next best thing.


I mean it makes total sense. If the prices go down then the math is super simple. If people are leaving its very likely they're paying cheaper rent.

If anything 16% of their poll seems totally reasonable given the market & circumstances.


You couldn’t get evicted, but your sf bills continues to accrue while you may not have been working. Imagine the stress of people whose jobs didn’t come back to have 3 months of debt pile up like that


I enjoy looking at Zillow data and everything in the range I am looking at is racing back to 2018 prices, mainly driven by foreclosures.

I thought about investing, but it seems that mortgage lenders now expect a 40% down deposit on the property.


For investment property or primary residence? I didn't have to put down nearly that much for my residence in the east bay.


Investment property. When I bought my residence, the down payment was 20%. These current numbers come from a check on the Zillow advertised mortgage lenders. The 40% down in the simulation tool seems to be because lenders won’t take more than 700k in debt (>1M total cost).


A lot of investors stopped buying jumbo loans. FHA though is still buying conforming loans.


> The biggest group of tenants breaking leases in San Francisco are Generation Z workers, those between the ages of 18 to 25 years old

Since when did people born in 1995 counted as Gen-Z?


That's somewhere on the border. But really, this is more a matter of blaming the youngest generation for every problem that besets the older ones. Gen X are a bunch of nihilistic latch key kids, Millennials destroyed every industry but online retail and avocado farming, and now we can blame gen-z for breaking lease agreements while scrolling through their tik-toks. Of all the statistical screw ups in this article, getting the age range of gen-z off by a few years seems mild.


Well, they're also less likely to have much savings, more likely to have a service job that doesn't currently exist, and more likely to still have the option to go to stay with the folks. I would expect young folks to be much more likely to break a lease than older folks.

I do agree that generational nonsense has been pretty rich lately.

  -- Nihilist raised by the tee-vee


According to some, that's right around the border between millennials and whatever comes afterwards.

The Wikipedia article on millennials says 1981 to 1996 is a "widely accepted" range of birth dates. The supporting reference[0] doesn't seem that authoritative, but it might be kind of self-fulfilling.[1]

[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20190313195431/http://te.tbr.fun...

[1]https://xkcd.com/978/


So far it seems this has not yet affected housing sales much more than the typical seasonal: https://www.movoto.com/san-francisco-ca/market-trends/

Look at the 5 year chart. it basically shows inventories are still roughly the same place they were at this time the last 5 years.


This is the first time SF is down YoY for the past decade.


In a few months we’ll be hearing complaints about how tech people came and drove local housing to insane levels.


alarming to whom?


I’m guessing alarming to slumlords, property maintainers and the like.




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