With median list prices up 9.21 percent year over year to a U.S.-leading $819,000 in September, according to realtor.com data, San Francisco is fast transforming into even more of a rarefied place.
As prices rise, more landlords in the city are moving to evict tenants in order to sell their units — under the provisions of a state law known as the “Ellis Act” — than they have in a decade, according to a new report from the city’s budget and legislative analyst.
From March 2012 to February 2013, 116 renters were evicted in San Francisco under the Ellis Act, according to the report. That’s almost triple from the same period in 2009-2010, but still quite a bit lower than the all-time high of 384 that coincided with the dot-com boom in 1999-2000.
The number of Ellis Act evictions, however, masks three to four times the number of tenants who have been bought out by landlords so they can either sell the properties or rent them for higher prices, Ted Gullickson, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
The report also revealed that the median rental price throughout San Francisco stood at $3,414 in June 2013, a jump of 8 percent from 2012.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
