San Francisco home sellers 4 times more likely to sell at a loss: report

Homeowners in San Francisco looking to sell in the troubled city are a whopping four times more likely than the average US home seller to take a loss, according to real estate brokerage Redfin.

Residents looking to get out of the city — where a once-trendy downtown area has descended into a drug-addled hellscape, and historic hotels have been converted into roach-infested “Single-Room Occupancy” housing for vagrants — can expect to sell their San Francisco abode for $100,000 less than they bought it for.

Roughly 12.3% — or one in eight — of the homes sold in the Bay Area during the three months ended July 31 was purchased for less than the seller bought it for, Redfin found.

The figure is a 5% increase from the same period a year ago, is higher than any other major US metropolis and a staggering four times the 3% national rate of homeowners who take a loss when selling their homes, according to the real estate firm.

Detroit is home to the second-highest share of homeowners who take a loss in their home-selling transactions, at 6.9%, followed by Chicago and New York, where 6.5% and 5.9% of homeowners take a loss in selling their homes, respectively.

Though the share of New York homeowners who reported a loss was half that in San Francisco, the cities were tied for the largest median loss in dollars, at $100,000, Redfin found in a separate analysis.

Thus, it’s not a surprise that San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago and New York all rank among the top 10 cities Redfin found residents want to move out of.

San Francisco ranks No. 1, New York No. 2, Chicago No. 5 and Detroit No. 9, according to Redfin.

Across the US, the average homeowner who didn’t profit off of selling their home lost $35,538, according to Redfin, which analyzed Multiple Listing Service data across the top 50 US cities of homes that were owned by the same party for at least nine months before the sale.

States where homeowners were least likely to sell at a loss: San Diego, Boston, Providence, R.I., Kansas City, Mo., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

In each of these cities, only about 1% of homes sold for less than the seller originally paid, Redfin reported.

Redfin attributed San Francisco’s unfortunate housing stats to a sharp decline in home prices triggered by high mortgage rates, which climbed to their highest level since 2001 last month.

As of April, the city’s median home price was down over 13% year over year — triple the nationwide slowdown of 4.2% — swiping a whopping $60 billion in the total value of homes since last year.

In addition, home prices in the Bay Area fell because the metro area was hit hard by mass layoffs in the tech sector, Redfin said.

Major tech firms based in San Francisco like Apple, Google, Meta and Salesforce all conducted rounds of layoffs within the past year.

In one of the largest layoffs San Francisco saw in recent months, Meta sacked 21,000 employees as part of Mark Zuckerberg’s so-called “year of efficiency.”

Salesforce also axed some 7,000 staffers — 10% of its workforce — at the beginning of this year after rapid pandemic-era hiring left the company with “too many people” amid an economic slowdown.

And late last year, Elon Musk infamously slashed his staff at Twitter, now known as X, in half, handing nearly 4,000 workers pink slips.