East Bay Area rents follow job growth

Link Corkery has been tracking Bay Area job growth for over two decades. His findings have been the subject of many of his RHANAC articles and analysis. We have found that by studying the trends in employment we can predict movement in the rental market.

The Change in Rents vs. Employment graph shows that in 2002 the rental market in San Francisco bottomed out and began to reverse its trend after the .com bust. We can see that as the job market began to recover on both sides of the Bay rents followed.

East Bay Apartment Rents Decrease Slightly while Vacancies Increase

(Oakland 3/10/2010) … The Rental Housing Association of Northern Alameda County (RHANAC) announced today that average residential rents in six East Bay cities — Alameda, Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, Piedmont, and Albany — appear to have decreased slightly by 1.6% from $1,108 in 2008 to $1,090 by the end of 2009 while the vacancy rate increased from 1.8% to 5.2%, a 188 % change. The study included 3,582 rental units or almost 2.5% of the entire rental market in these cities and is RHANAC’s 7th annual study of the market. The survey includes rent control units that were recently re-rented at market rates, units that are non-rent controlled, and excludes government subsidized units.

PowerPoint presentation by Rental Housing Association of Northern Alameda County