This Is What Passes For a Craigslist Rental In San Francisco
San Francisco's housing market is now more exuberant than the dotcom boom, leaving eviction notices for longtime tenants and all cash buyers in a bidding frenzy. Even renting a couch in some dude's living room now comes with a sweat equity clause.
This Craigslist ad for a $900 "Condo studio equivalent" in Nob Hill starts out more like a job listing, delineating the kind of specialized skill set one might demand of a paid employee:
Seeking Condo mate who has web development skills: Msql, graphics, php, Lasso or a combination of these.
The ad is listed under "apts/housing for rent" and not "labor/cheap," and thus offers some wiggle room when it comes to the cost of rent:
$900 plus, hopefully, 20-25 hours web development/mo. negotiable.
According to Indeed, the average salary for PHP developers is $85,000, for Lasso developers it's $43,000, and MySQL developers command $89,000. (The wages go even higher if you search for engineer instead of developer.) Offer those same skills to your Craigslist landlord, however, and there may be some equity in it . . . for "the right person."
$900/mo. plus utilities approx. $50/mo. and 5 - 6 hours web development assistance per week. Equity on the table to the right person. (The web based service serves a $750 million market.)
The owner of the listing never actually mentions that he or she is running a tech startup—that part is just implied. But even if all your have to go on (about your future home) is the size-of-market slide in a PowerPoint pitch deck, you're in the same boat as other tech workers, who are often left "in the dark" about what their equity is worth.
Oh, and the lucky tenant of this Nob Hill hideout will be coding for free for 5 hours to 25 hours (negotiable) from the comfort of a couch:
This is a one bedroom unit where I may be infrequently. The space will rent basically as a relatively large studio with the bedroom not included.
The most remarkable thing about the listing is just that there's probably someone in San Francisco right now who thinks this is a fair deal.
To contact the author of this post, please email nitasha@gawker.com.