A sudden flood of engineering talent on the market has other problems. Salaries could go down and given how expensive The Bay Area is then that could be problematic.
Given how hard hiring has been, I doubt it. The current talent shortage could absorb a huge number of engineers. A lot of startups are well funded for many years anyway. People are predicting doom and gloom but I really don't see it. Home prices falling is also probably not a terrible thing, even on an engineer's salary homes are hard to come by, and rents are extreme. A small correction is probably a good thing. I bought my house at the bottom of the housing market in 2011 and its value has nearly doubled since then which is ridiculous to me. I also have enough savings to last me years. Lots of companies are also doing just fine. This really isn't the earth shattering dot com bust some of you want it to be.
The out-sized "demand" is largely coming from yield hungry investors and Chinese investors looking for a bolthole.
Both kinds of demand could easily be clamped down upon by raising property taxes - the victims of which would be wealthy foreign investors and people who have sat on one of the largest increase in property values in history.
Likewise, supply could be increased if local government were at all interested in doing so just by building 10,000-20,000 low income apartments.
If the government announced both, the cost of San Francisco housing would plummet within days.
You might try local Realtors (especially those who specialize as buyer agents) that advertise in Chinese (or that they speak Mandarin or Cantonese) to see if any recent transactions fit the bill.
Also, sales are open record - you might look at buyers with Chinese surnames that lack Americanized first names.
In the short run, sure. In the long run, what happens when many of the Chinese business owners who have been parking their wealth on the coasts of America face a liquidity crunch and suddenly need that money to keep their companies going?
We've been here before: back in the 80s, Japan was buying up most of the real, tangible assets in the U.S.
The cause was the same: strong export products, an undervalued currency, and easy-money policies. The first signs of trouble were the same: high inflation, crony capitalism, and poor transparency in the market. Let's see if the rest of history plays out the same way.
It's probably just like vancouver, lots of money, no place for it to go, you can launder foreign money basically legally into a house in the US. You should search for vancouver and see the ycomb story on it earlier this week.
