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.

Housing here is just limited supply and high demand. I don't see prices falling, given how strict getting a $1m+ loan is in the first place.

Prices won't really go down unless people are forced to sell.

That said, I have sympathy for the LinkedIn engineers who were holding all their stock for a down payment. That's gotta hurt.

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.

Why do you think home prices will fall? There is plenty of foreign investment money out there to shove into the real estate market.

We have this problem in Boston right now. We're building and it's doing nothing to the rents because it's being snapped up by foreigners.

The Chinese stock market hasn't exactly been doing great lately either...

Which is why wealthy Chinese will be seeking a safer place to put their money.

How do I find out who the Chinese owned housing people are so I can seek to rent their vacant properties while they live in china?

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.

Which is why Chinese money needs to chase returns elsewhere?

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.

http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america-buyin...

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.

This. I was reminded of the Japanese and Middle East based investors who were on a real estate buying rampage in the 80s.

They get bailed out by the communist gov't?

Why do you think most of the new housing here in Boston is going to foreign investors and staying empty?

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.