Facebook IPO fuels Bay Area spending boom

[pesto]

At the time most of those housing statistics were compiled, Facebook had under 2000 employees worldwide, mostly in Palo Alto. They now have around 3000, shifting to Menlo Park.

This is 30 miles of pretty bad rush-hour commute from SF, so I'm guessing not more than 300 live in SF. They presumably are not new people to the Bay Area or SF and are largely former employees of Sun, HP, Palm or other s/w, networking or general tech companies that have laid off people.

I would assume that this is immaterial to the SF housing market. The Menlo Park or PA housing market would be more meaningfully affected, if you are really interested in local demographics.

[Gordo]

^There's a Facebook bus stop (the company runs shuttle buses from SF, just as Google, Apple, Genentech, etc do) at the corner closest to my place in SF. I don't know the exact schedule, but I'd guess that the buses come every 20 minutes or so in the morning, and look to be pretty packed. No idea how many may live in SF, but 300 seems pretty low, just based on how many current or former Facebook employees I seem to meet.

And no, most are not former HP, Palm, or Sun employees. Facebook is infamous for viewing anyone older than 30 as washed up and too old to be a good hire. Their employee base skews astoundingly young, and makes Google's employee base look very gray by comparison.

Now, I will agree that this has likely had much less of an impact on SF prices than the press has made out. The general startup fever and ridiculously constrained internet/software labor market in SF (of which Facebook is a relatively small part) is more to blame.