A number of companies headquartered in San Francisco are expected to go public this year, including Slack, which confirmed Monday that it had filed for an IPO, and Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and Pinterest.
However, according to a report released on Tuesday by Zillow, newly-public Silicon Valley startups could make it more difficult for San Francisco Bay Area residents to find an affordable home, based on past IPOs and their impacts on the home market.
Zillow examined the link between Facebook’s IPO in 2012 and rising home prices across the Bay Area and found that home values rose more quickly in neighborhoods with higher concentrations of Facebook employees after the social network became a publicly-traded company.
Specifically, every 10 Facebook employees living in a given U.S. Census tract at the time of the IPO were associated with an extra 1.6-percentage-points increase in home values over the following year, the report said.
In dollar figures, the median value home in a neighborhood with a high concentration of Facebook workers rose by an extra $20,800 between May 2012 and May 2013. Zillow cautioned that it couldn’t determine whether Facebook’s IPO alone caused that increase, as other factors likely drove home prices higher in those areas.
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