On a sunny Saturday, artificial intelligence engineer Sahand Mozaffari and his wife, Donia Zaheri, climbed the stairs to a three-bedroom flat in Duboce Triangle with an asking rent of $9,000 per month.
It was about the 20th apartment they'd seen since arriving in the city a week earlier.
Back in Seattle, the couple lived with their dog, an Akita-bulldog mix named Eddie, in a three-bedroom house with a backyard for a monthly rent of $3,000.
“We thought Seattle was expensive,” said Zaheri, a transit engineer. “We didn't know about this city.”
Mozaffari and Zaheri are part of a surge of professionals who are pouring into town as the AI boom supercharges the city's rental market.
Throngs of newly arrived, well-paid workers are searching for housing at a moment when years of limited homebuilding has ramped up competition for the relatively few homes that come available, helping San Francisco reclaim its pre-pandemic title as the most expensive apartment market in America, surpassing New York City this summer, according to CoStar research.
Apartment hunters say they're spending weeks chasing internet listings, squeezing into packed open houses or offering thousands of dollars above the asking rent. Others are simply giving up.
These days, "looking for a place to live in San Francisco is a full-time job," said relocation specialist Lisa McCarrel, the founder of Move Bay Area.
The city isn’t the nation’s tightest apartment market — New York City’s vacancy rate of 2.9% is lower than San Francisco’s 3.6% — but that could change in the coming months as the number of renters is expected to continue to outpace the amount of available apartments, with construction remaining at historically low levels.
Wild West
An Aug. 3 snapshot from the city controller’s office reported that San Francisco is experiencing an “accelerating period of economic growth, primarily driven by the AI investment boom.” It cited data showing that asking rents grew 14% between March and July alone, as house prices soared, even as prices elsewhere in the state have fallen.
The city's average monthly asking rent is $3,864, well over double the nationwide average, said Nigel Hughes, senior director of market analytics at CoStar.
Rents that seemed exorbitant during the bruising rental market summer of 2025 now seem like pretty good deals.
Leasing agent Deborah Brown with J. Wavro Associates said a studio apartment in the Marina, a bayfront neighborhood of stucco homes and Golden Gate Bridge views, that fetched $2,500 a month a year ago is now $3,800. A one-bedroom in storied Pacific Heights was $5,000 in 2025 and is now asking $6,500, “and that’s with no parking — and a lot of people are applying.”
“It’s wild out there,” Brown said.
'Maximum rent'
Would-be tenants report spending days calling and sending messages online about listings on platforms like Zillow and Craigslist without being able to reach a person. Open houses for available units routinely draw 40 or 50 people in the first hour.
Scams are rampant. The story of one particularly brazen scheme went viral last month after a scammer duped a man out of $18,600 by impersonating the landlord of an actual vacant unit.
“I really feel bad for these people,” Brown said. “Someone will come to me and say, ‘I’ve been out there looking for months,' and I’ll go, 'I don’t know what to tell you.'"
Moreover, the advertised rent is not necessarily final. Bidding wars, a common practice in New York City, have become widespread in San Francisco in the past few months. Tenant advocates say the practice violates California tenant and consumer protection laws. But they concede such laws are extremely difficult to enforce in such a climate.
Mozaffari, the AI engineer from Seattle, said he and his wife had run up against this “clearly illegal” maneuver after submitting an application for a place they toured and liked. They got an email congratulating them on making it onto a short list and inviting them to submit their “maximum rent.”
He said: “I reported it and everything, but it turns out that’s just something everyone does.”
Landlord's market
But some say offering more money is one of the only ways for apartment hunters to stand out in what is clearly a landlord’s market.
Kevin Alayo, 22, began looking for a place in the city to share with roommates soon after graduating this year from Cornell University and landing a job at the San Francisco office of asset management firm TPG.
Alayo originally had his heart set on the Marina, with its grassy bayside parks and bustling wine bars, “but even if we had an infinite budget," he said, there were few listings. At one point, he offered a landlord $1,000 over the asking rent of $5,500 per month for a two-bedroom just off the Chestnut Street main drag but never heard anything back.
Finally, after several weeks of couch surfing and going to as many as a half dozen open houses a day, Alayo got lucky. He landed a place on Powell Street in Nob Hill the old-fashioned way, through a friend of a friend. He and three other recent college grads planned to convert the dining room into a fourth bedroom to split the $9,000 monthly rent four ways.
Other young apartment hunters tired of spending hours compulsively refreshing digital apartment listings and being ghosted by agents are turning to similar analog strategies.
One back-to-basics approach being discussed on social media is walking the city in search of “For rent” signs. Another suggests scanning neighborhood newspapers for vacant apartment listings in Russian and Chinese.
'Full-time job'
It all feels familiar to longtime residents. San Francisco has been a city of booms and busts going all the way back to the California Gold Rush in the mid-19th century.
Yet the sudden shift to remote work during the pandemic hit the city especially hard. The formerly bustling metropolis felt deserted and dirty, as many who'd come to town to take part in a tech bonanza left seemingly overnight.
Brown, the listing agent, remembers having as many as 500 vacant apartments in her portfolio at one point in 2021. Today, she has barely a handful.
McCarrel said she and her staff are getting a record number of requests for help finding housing from bewildered newcomers.
"For a lot of people, the last thing they heard was San Francisco was not a desirable place to live," she said.
Now the headlines of a few years ago trumpeting rising concerns about crime and shuttered shops have been replaced by a regular drumbeat of news about startups signing office leases as billions of dollars in venture capital saturate the city.
McCarrel advises apartment hunters on how to approach the process like hunting for a job — or dating online. She coaches them on everything from putting together a "tenant résumé" to how to strike up a rapport with a leasing agent.
In this climate, she gently suggests that folks without high enough salaries or perfect credit histories consider looking at neighboring cities such as Oakland, where rents have remained well below San Francisco levels — though that is now starting to change.
“If you don’t need to move to San Francisco right now — don't,” she advises.
Just the beginning
Even AI founders and executives with deep pockets are finding it challenging to find a suitable place to live, said Sotheby’s Adrian Tan. The luxury sales agent has an emerging side business helping well-heeled millennial and Gen Z tech clients who usually find him by word of mouth after experiencing “a bit of a struggle to find a place."
His leasing clients are typically founders in their 30s or younger who “maybe want to wait a bit before buying a $6 million home” but can pay at least $15,000 to $20,000 per month to rent a luxury apartment or single-family house.
“They are doing very well, have had an influx of capital and have a budget for housing and can use it accordingly,” Tan said.
He noted that tenants in San Francisco haven't historically hired leasing brokers, until recently.
“It’s just a very special time,” Tan said.
By all accounts, the cost of housing in the city is expected to keep rising as AI leaders Anthropic and OpenAI prepare to go public.
Officials are struggling to encourage developers to build more housing in the city, where a rising costs and financing challenges dovetailed with stagnant rents to bring new home construction in recent years to its lowest point since the aftermath of the Great Recession.
But those efforts, if they're successful, will take years to come to fruition.
In the meantime, the housing shortage will continue to have an outsize impact on the nearly two-thirds of San Franciscans who live in rentals. Close to half of them reside in buildings constructed before 1940.
“Our housing starts have been so depressed for so many years now," said San Francisco’s chief economist, Ted Egan. "Particularly in the neighborhoods where a lot of affluent young people tend to want to live — the Marinas and the Russian Hills and the North Beaches — you’re just not seeing much vacancy."
AI startups that can't afford to lease luxury corporate housing for their workers are starting to take steps to address the shortage of affordable housing in San Francisco.
Kikoff, a fintech company headquartered in the SoMa District, has begun offering a monthly rental subsidy to workers who live within a mile of the office and come to work in person at least four days per week.
CEO Cynthia Chen said the move aims to recognize the reality that faces a growing number of the company’s San Francisco workers: “Rent has become painful.”