Local investors feeling the crunch?

[Audrey Ezeh]

I'm surprised San Francisco is doing much better than these areas...

http://www.realtor.com/news/trends/top-10-housing-...

[Arlen Chou]

@Wes Blackwell as you know I am interested in the Sacramento area, but for reasons that are not really relevant to this topic.  @Amit M. as you know I am deep into the buy and hold strategy in the Bay Area.  Both areas have interesting opportunities, but they are geared for different types of investors.  I fully believe that there is money to be made in both markets.  But I think it is incorrect to base a decision on the idea of "tech" workers migrating of of the BA and the Bay Area only being a 1 industry town.

There was a string of posts on this topic last year, but I feel it is important to educate our fellow BP'ers that the term "tech workers" is not a single class of employees but a very WIDE catch all phrase that encompasses everything from bio-tech to chip design to aerospace etc, etc, etc.  These very different industries do not move in lock step, nor are they effected by the same macroeconomic factors.  As an example a software "tech engineer" can write code for Google, Amazon, Tesla, Salesforce.com, airBnB, Uber or any other countless companies.  The point being that the primary industry for each one of my examples is completely different but the "tech" skill set of the software engineer is applicable in all industries.  The easy fall back is to say; "sure that is for a software engineer".  However, it applies to hardware, electrical, design and a plethora of other "tech engineering" careers.

The real point is that the "high tech" of today will be the "low tech" of tomorrow.  As that "high technology business slowly slides into "low tech" side of the scale, corporations will look for ways to minimize costs because they will no longer be the "it" company and pulling the giant PE ratios.  This will drive jobs out of the core BA.  But it would be a mistake to believe that NEW "high tech" won't fill the voids and along with those new technologies will be a new army of "tech engineers".

My point is that jobs will move to Sacramento but jobs will also be created in the BA.  So I guess my point is that both of you guys are right for different reasons ;-) kumbaya