Being heavily focused on selling real estate in San Francisco, and not renting it, we’re always on the lookout for a quick and easy tool to help answer that question, “What do you think this place would rent for?” Aside from actually contacting a true expert in the field of rentals and having them go in and take a look at the property, our hands have been tied. Not any more. There is a new website out there tackling this very problem, rentBits.com, “a free national rental search engine that also offers free rental rates pages for over 4,000 cities in the United States. Using data from over 7,000,000 rental houses, condos and apartments, the service gives renters, property managers and leasing agents key information on average rental rates in their city.”
The above screenshot is from their San Francisco page (obviously we only care about San Francisco), and you can get to that page by following this link. Have a look around. We find it pretty informative, but then again we only have a few minutes to check things out these days and put them out there for you to pore over in detail.
as usual for SF, anything with median and average is useless… (specially when there is no way to use THE exhaustive (and nowhere available) list of rentals)
but their search engine to pull listings from everywhere else is somewhat ok.
The quality of the listings (disclosure of address, plenty of details for property etc) makes it – indeed – a nice start to guess one’s own property.
still lots of bugs, but much better than craigslist.
One of my co-writers has a two bedroom, two bathroom place in Pacific Heights and says he rented it out for about 5% more than last year. He’s at market rate, and the market rate has gone UP as the stock market has rebounded.
We’ve gone through the worst recession in our careers, and rental prices have barely inched down, and are up in some places. Go figure.
Keigu,
Shogun
Slicing Through Money’s Mysteries