[quote=svelte]Let’s break it down using guesstimates…
QCOM has 33K employees, 15K of which are in San Diego…50%
If the layoffs occur in the same ratio, that means 2.5k of the 5K will come out of San Diego.
Out of those, say a third live in high cost areas along the coast, such as Carmel Valley.
The two-thirds not in high cost areas (1600 folks) will likely not be forced to sell due to working spouses, 401Ks, reserves, etc that can probably meet the lower mortgage. Of course some of those families will choose to move to other areas of the country, but they likely won’t be forced into selling at fire sale prices.
The one-third (800) that live in high cost coastal areas may be at risk. Say a quarter to half of those are forced to sell. That’s 200-400 more homes on the market over the next year…20 to 30 a month.
Will it affect housing prices? Probably. Will it crash housing prices? No.[/quote]
There’s another angle to this that I hate to say..But…The other angle to this is out of the layoffs, how much of these layoffs are disproportionately going to be the grunt worker bees engineers versus say Directors and VPs, that tend to live in the higher cost areas? There are a lot of Directors and VPs that have very little number of reports at that company. But at the same time, they probably are much better connected to the execs than your run of the mill grunt enginerd. If this layoff happens like most traditional layoffs at other companies, the management team manage to screw over the grunts while saving themselves.
And even if an director vp is impacted, I’m pretty sure they get a much nicer severance (early retirement) package than your average worker bee enginerd.
For example, when Sanjay when to Motorola, some of his favtorite VPs were pushed out by the new leaders. I believe some of them were forced to retire. However, those VPs still live where they lived in Del Mar and CV, the last time I visited friends that live next to them. My own neighbor was pushed out of Motorola when Google took over. He’s doing just fine as well, not working for a few months…
there will be some churn by some folks, nevertheless. Not convinced it will be earth shattering…
