When Alex Belton and her fiancé started their search for a single-family house in San Francisco last fall, their budget was $1.2 million. After being repeatedly outbid, it has increased to $1.5 million, and they have switched their search to Marin County, where the median home price is slightly lower.
“Our new pastime is crunching numbers because I just feel like we’re just constantly trying to re-evaluate and see, ‘Can we afford to up the budget?’” said Ms. Belton, who works as a nurse in the city.
The median home sale price in the San Francisco metro area increased more than 10 percent in April from a year earlier, to $1.7 million, according to a recent report by Redfin. The metro area now boasts the highest median home price in the country. The shift comes after San Francisco’s national reputation plunged during the pandemic when headlines about petty crime, public drug use and tent encampments raised worries over its future. The city’s constrained housing supply has added to that pressure.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, home prices in the Bay Area’s luxury ZIP codes have sharply risen, as prices in the most affordable ZIP codes have fallen, according to recent data from Redfin. The divergence in growth rates between luxury and non-luxury markets did not exist before ChatGPT’s release and is not common in other major markets.
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