Northern California

Thinking about renting out a property somewhere between Susanville and the Salinas Valley? Whether you own a flat in a city where renting is the natural first step for anyone starting a career, a house in one of the quieter Sacramento suburbs, or a small building in the Central Valley, Northern California offers it all. With fifteen offices from the North Bay down through Silicon Valley and out to Fresno, we know a thing or two about this half of the state.

Those offices look after single-family homes, condominiums, small multifamily buildings and commercial space. The work is the same in each city — marketing the property, placing a resident, collecting the rent, handling maintenance, sending you a statement every month — but San Francisco is not Stockton, and the ordinance that governs a three-unit building in San Jose has nothing to say about a house in Elk Grove. A good many of the owners we do this for do not live in California at all.

San Francisco, often called The City by the Bay, has long been a hotbed for innovation, creativity and opportunity, and it is home to a slew of tech giants, some of the most recognizable landmarks in the country and a genuinely varied cultural scene. Young professionals arrive from all over the world to start a career here, and renting is the natural first step for most of them — which is why the flats turn over quickly and why a well-presented unit rarely sits empty for long.

San Jose is well known as the capital of Silicon Valley, and just as well known as one of the most expensive metro areas in the country, where roughly a quarter of households bring in a quarter of a million dollars a year and can still be priced out of the median-priced home. It stays popular in spite of that: over a million residents and growing, one of California’s largest cities, and the second highest count of Fortune 500 headquarters after New York. Cisco, Adobe and eBay were all founded here, and it generates more patents than any other city in the country. Not everyone in San Jose works in tech, and not everyone at a tech company is an engineer — those firms need customer service, finance and accounting too, which is part of why the rental demand is broader than the stereotype suggests.

The East Bay and the North Bay are where a good deal of that demand actually lands. Our offices in San Leandro, Walnut Creek, Emeryville, Pleasanton and Vallejo cover the inland side of the bay, and Novato and Petaluma the counties north of the bridge. These are commuter markets, and they behave like commuter markets: tenancies run longer, turnover is cheaper, and the yield maths works differently from the city.

Sacramento is home to a wealth of culture and history, from the Tower Bridge and the State Capitol to a good number of well-kept parks. The area is walkable and attractive with its tree-lined streets; it is also expensive, loud and crowded, which is precisely why so many of the neighborhoods just outside the center have become favorites with locals — Midtown, Mansion Flats, East Sac, and Folsom and Davis further out. Elk Grove, immediately south, is one of the fastest-growing parts of the metro.

Stockton sits in the Central Valley within San Joaquin County, founded in 1849 and named after Robert F. Stockton. It is the 13th largest city in California with more than 312,000 residents, sits on the San Joaquin river surrounded by the thousands of miles of waterway that form the California Delta, and holds one of the state’s only two inland sea ports — the other being Sacramento. US News named it America’s most diverse city in 2020. The three largest employers are St. Joseph’s Medical Center, Stockton Unified School District and the City of Stockton, and only about 28% of households here are renter-occupied, which keeps well-run rentals in short supply.

Fresno is the fifth most populated city in California, with over 550,000 residents. It sits in the center of the San Joaquin Valley about two hours from the coast, named for the ash trees along the San Joaquin River, and it is a strong family market on the back of the number of well-regarded schools across the city, a substantial downtown, and the lakes, parks and rivers close by. Further out, Santa Cruz and the Salinas valley answer to the coast and to agriculture rather than to tech, and Susanville, up in Lassen County, is a small, steady market of its own. Each office page carries its own pricing, the manager responsible and a direct number.

Apartments in San Francisco are abundant and renting is a natural first step, so the neighborhood a property sits in does most of the work in setting both the rent and the length of the tenancy. If a tenant is into strolling through art galleries on the weekend, cheering on the Giants at their home baseball stadium, and rubbing elbows with new friends at the local dive bars, SoMa goes at the top of the list; South of Market offers a good work/life balance with plenty of startups in the neighborhood and quick access to the financial district, and new and innovative restaurants, hip bars and a wealth of cultural arts to explore when the week ends. The very trendy and lively Mission District also happens to be San Francisco’s oldest neighborhood, where you’ll find a diverse spread of residents ranging from hip young artists to techies to families; it offers a little bit for everyone, holds a lower cost of living than the San Francisco average, and is known for its nightlife, live music, and walkability.

Sacramento is walkable and beautiful with its tree-lined streets; however, it is also very expensive, loud, and crowded, and whether a tenant is working in the city or just wanting to be close to it, there are many neighborhoods just outside the center that have become favorites of locals. Midtown is within walking distance to almost everything while still quieter, and is known for its nightlife and convenience — one of the best downtown-like experiences you can get without actually living downtown. Mansion Flats, home to old Victorian homes, is close to nightlife and activities while staying more affordable than areas such as East Sacramento. Davis is a favorite of young professionals for the mixed urban/suburban feel, and of families for the highly-rated schools, and is often considered one of the best places to live in California. Folsom, with many amenities for residents of all ages, always ranks highly among the most livable cities in California, and traffic there is considered reasonable compared to many parts of Sacramento.

In the Central Valley, Woodward Park is one of the most popular neighborhoods in the Fresno area. Located in the northern outskirts of the city, about a ten-minute drive from the heart of downtown Fresno, it has nearby access to parks and quiet suburban streets with low population density and plenty of greenery, with rafting on Kings River and golf at the Riverside close by, and the Fresno Convention Center offering events year-round.

The point of all of this, for an owner, is that these are not interchangeable addresses. A house in Davis and a house in Mansion Flats are two different products with two different tenants, and pricing either from a metro average leaves money on the table in one direction or a long vacancy in the other.

The best way to prepare for a rent increase on a Northern California rental is to work out which ceiling applies to your property and build it into a standard procedure, rather than recalculating it one tenancy at a time. Under the Tenant Protection Act the ceiling is not a single statewide figure — it is set per CPI area, and it changes every August. Every line below links to the page it was taken from so you can check it yourself.

The state figure is a ceiling, not the whole picture. San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose and Sacramento each run their own rent stabilization scheme with its own annual allowance, its own registration and its own just-cause list, and where a local ordinance is stricter it is the one that binds you. San Jose’s Apartment Rent Ordinance, for instance, reaches buildings of three or more units put up before September 1979 and sets a much lower ceiling than the state does. Those sit on the office page for the city they govern, where they can be read against the ordinance itself.