Pushing tech crowd is pouring in
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If San Francisco is becoming the Manhattan of the west (as my colleague Sarah Mishkin suggested in her article on the city in July), Oakland promises to be its Brooklyn. The premium coffee-toting, Bugaboo-pushing tech crowd is pouring in from across the bay as prices in San Francisco explode from a high base. The median price for a three-bedroom home in San Francisco is almost $1.5m, while in Oakland it is only $600,000, according to real estate website Trulia.
This gap hides another major change: even in Oakland, median home sales prices have more than doubled in the past five years.
“What Oakland and Brooklyn have in common is they are both next to even more expensive areas and so relative to their immediate neighbour they are fairly affordable and not quite as dense,” says Jed Kolko, chief economist at Trulia. “The East Bay [Oakland, Berkeley and nearby cities] is only affordable by the standards of the Bay Area, not compared with almost anywhere else in the country.”
Ann Wilkins, a real estate agent for Sotheby’s International, said it was on one weekend in January last year that she realised the San Franciscans were coming. Standing in a kitchen of a home on sale in the Rockridge area of Oakland, she overheard couples whispering whether they should offer $200,000 over the asking price. The house, which had been bought only 12 months earlier for $740,000, ended up selling for almost $1m.