Can’t find an apartment in San Francisco? Go ahead and blame AI

When looking for an apartment in San Francisco today, artificial intelligence can seem inescapable; and that’s not just because every rental building seems to have an AI bot answering calls. 

In San Francisco, the technology’s ascendency—and the subsequent skyrocketing job growth— has helped make the apartment market one of the tightest in the nation, with the fastest growing rent in the U.S.

Lisa McCarrel, Managing Partner of Move Bay Area, a relocation and rental housing service, has seen the rental market become frenzied in recent months due in part to the increase in AI and AI-adjacent jobs. With units harder to come by, she’s seen some potential tenants offer a year’s rent in cash upfront.  

“I just had a meeting with my team because spring time is typically when the rental market here starts to get crazy,” says McCarrel. “But it’s already crazy. I’ve been running this business for 11 years, and this is the first time I’ve had to hold a meeting to prepare staff for what will be a hyper-competitive market.”

Between 2024 and 2025, job postings for AI roles in the Bay Area, many extremely high-paying, grew 72%, from roughly 57,000 to 99,000, according to an analysis by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. That influx of new, highly paid workers—who may be renting until a post-IPO windfall—has helped rents in the city of San Francisco jump 13% year-over-year, according to data from Apartment List. 

The market currently has a 3.5% vacancy rate, roughly half the national average (nearly even with the city’s pre-Covid 2019 vacancy rate of 3.4%). Jackie Tom, founder and broker of the agency Rentals in SF, said the market is now very busy and well past pre-pandemic pricing. 

A different kind of tech boom

But not all tech booms are created equal. AI’s outsized impact on San Francisco differs today significantly from the impact of the 2010s tech expansion, when it felt like tech hiring had a wider impact on other economic sectors. In part, that’s because of both where AI firms are located and their workforce cultures, as well as the overall state of the economy. That same job posting analysis found non-AI jobs in the region declined 1% over the same period.

“Ten years ago, you had tech workers flocking to San Francisco, but a lot of them moved to the South Bay or the Peninsula, or lived across the city and took buses to Menlo Park, Mountain View or Cupertino,” says Apartment List economist Chris Salviati, referencing the Silicon Valley HQs of Meta, Alphabet, and Apple, respectively. “Right now, the neighborhoods where AI companies are based are seeing an influx of apartment demand.” 

San Francisco neighborhoods such as SoMa, where Anthropic recently took over a 430,000 square-foot office, and Mission Bay, where OpenAI expanded its office footprint to encompass more than 1 million square feet, have seen skyrocketing demand for rental units, says Salviati.  RentCafe data shows one-bedroom units in these neighborhoods at $4,700 and $3,800. Anna Squires Levine, president of coworking firm Industrious, said demand for their San Francisco locations has been “off the charts” due to AI.

AI firms have embraced “9-9-6” culture, a concept pushing workers to grind from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. With that kind of schedule, and offices and startups clustered in a handful of neighborhoods, the new AI workforce wants to live as close as possible, ideally walking distance, to eliminate long commutes. One firm, Cluey, even gives its employees rental subsidies. 

That’s a sea change from the 2010s boom that reshaped San Francisco, where many workers either lived in the city, as well as Oakland, and commuted to Silicon Valley offices. In fact, whereas Oakland was seen as a battleground against gentrification during the last tech wave a decade ago, dealing with dramatic rent increases, today, its apartment market has flatlined, as a lack of demand and a surplus of new apartment supply has pushed rents down 20% compared to 2020. 

AI’s growth, in terms of its office leasing footprint, remains ravenous, says Colin Yasukochi, executive director of the Tech Insights Center at CBRE, a massive international real estate brokerage and services firm. Last year, nearly a third of the 10.5 million square feet of office leases were for AI companies. Yasukochi says that if you add up all the total space requirements for AI firms looking for new offices right now, it would total 3.3 million square feet.

McCarrel of Move Bay Area says she’s seeing industry growth move in phases; last year, she was helping AI startup founders find places to live, and now she’s working with more of the employees they’re starting to hire.

For AI firms, says Yasukochi, the most important factor is time, as they race each other to deliver the newest model or breakthrough; leases have mostly been for massive blocks of move-in ready space they can immediately occupy and get to work (typically, high-end office tenants would spend lots of time and money refurbishing their trophy offices). 

Keeping pressure on a crowded rental market

The influx of thousands of new tech jobs doesn’t offset area job losses in other sectors, as well as the tech industry at large, says Abby Raisz, Vice President of Research at the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. But it is concentrating pressure on the high end of the rental market.

The city’s long-time shortage of new housing, as well as stubbornly high interest rates pushing more high-income renters into the rental market instead of buying, has made that segment of the market especially crowded in 2026. McCarrel says that it’s a full-time job for someone seeking a place to have to continuously call leads and monitor what is and isn’t available; she doubts even an AI program made by some of these new arrivals would help someone figure out a new living arrangement. 

“There’s too many barriers,” she says. “You have to be very careful the way you communicate with brokers and owners; there’s a lot of competition.”

Most forecasts see AI companies continuing to expand, which will bring more jobs, and increase competition among San Francisco apartment seekers. Enrico Moretti, an economist at UC Berkeley, says as firms start commercializing AI, there will be an explosion in hiring as investment in training leads to more monetization. 

But the contours of this boom remain uncertain; if AI tools can make workers more efficient and therefore shrink office space and headcount, the companies most impacted by this effect will be those creating the AI in the first place.

“We have to throw out the ideas about the way companies grow right now,” says Raisz. “AI companies will be the best at using their tech to be efficient, and they’ll be really good about being efficient and not overhiring. Is AI a new job creator or destroyer? It’s still a question mark.”

McCarrel says the market is so tough, she’ll probably be handing out copies of articles like this one to potential renters she works with; the process of finding an apartment can “be like a marathon,” so best to set expectations right away.

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