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Residents list rentals at super-sized prices

Therese Lehane of San Jose, Calif., is renting out two of her rooms to Super Bowl news crews. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where high rents are legend, residents looking to make a quick buck are offering their homes at super-sized prices to visitors for the Super Bowl.

SAN FRANCISCO — In the San Francisco Bay Area, where high housing costs are notorious, residents looking to make a quick buck are offering to rent their homes at super-sized prices to the 1 million visitors expected for Super Bowl 50 festivities.

There’s a luxury 8,500-square-foot home in San Jose, California, listed for $10,000 a night. A 400-square-foot cottage in the same city is going for $3,900 for the three-night weekend. A four-bedroom apartment near San Francisco’s “Super Bowl City” is listed at $1,495 a night, with a minimum six night stay.

And let’s not forget a cozy tree house for two in a 150-year-old oak tree a half-hour drive from downtown San Francisco. You can call out for pizza and never mind that the bathroom is down the tree. Best of all, it’s just $495 a night.

Whether customers will pay such prices is uncertain, even in an area where hotel rooms are limited for the weeklong extravaganza. Of an estimated 50,000 hotel rooms in the nine-county Bay Area, the NFL has booked nearly half for players and their families, officials and employees, according to the local bowl organizing committee.

That means regular out-of-towners are on the hook to book a place for pre-game festivities in San Francisco and the game Feb. 7 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, about 40 miles to the south, when the Denver Broncos square off against the Carolina Panthers.

In response, the number of listings on traditional home-sharing sites such as Airbnb and HomeAway has soared. According to Airbnb, demand is about three times greater than for last year’s Super Bowl in Arizona, with homes closer to the stadium listed at higher prices than units in notoriously apartment-squeezed San Francisco.

“There is definitely demand and it’s definitely a great way to generate extra income, but you can’t go overboard. You can’t gouge, because there’s such an increase in supply,” said David Ordal, chief executive officer of Everbooked, a company that provides pricing and market analytics for Airbnb.

For example, he said that Santa Clara has 86 percent more listings for the bowl weekend than for other weekends in February. Prices are up 19 percent. San Francisco has 14 percent more listings, with prices up 25 percent.

“Unless you’re extremely close to the stadium, you shouldn’t shoot for the moon — you might walk away without a booking,” Ordal said.

Paul Arys is a homeowner who can shoot for the moon. He and his wife Laura Hernandez, who live about a 5-minute walk away from the stadium, have listed their two-bedroom house for $2,000 a night. The usual rate is $100 a night for a bedroom, or $500 for the entire house.

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