CBRE's 2026 report signals a major AI-driven shift in where high-income tech workers live and work
New York's tech talent workforce has surpassed San Francisco's for the first time in 13 years. The shift was driven by artificial intelligence hiring and Bay Area contractions, according to CBRE's 13th annual Scoring Tech Talent report.
The New York Metro area counted 394,300 tech workers as of 2025, edging out the San Francisco Bay Area's 375,730. New York added 30,640 workers between 2022 and 2025 while the Bay Area shed 23,900 over the same period.
For mortgage originators in both markets, the divergence marks a meaningful shift in where the next wave of high-earning mortgage applicants is concentrated.
"The story there is that there's been cuts in the Bay Area, so the tech industry has contracted the size of the tech talent workforce, and the finance sector [in New York] has hired a lot of tech talent and a lot of AI workers," said Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE's Tech Insights Center in San Francisco.
Finance sector fuels New York's tech surge
The finance, insurance, and real estate sector has been the standout driver of national tech employment growth since 2022, adding 90,530 tech jobs, more than any other non-high-tech industry.
Wall Street's surging demand for data scientists, AI engineers, and information systems managers has drawn workers who might once have headed to Silicon Valley.
For mortgage professionals tracking buyer profiles in the New York market, that pipeline of financially sophisticated, high-income borrowers is growing.
Despite New York's headcount lead, San Francisco retains the top position on CBRE's 13-metric indexed ranking, scoring 81.98 against New York Metro's 70.38.
On AI specifically, the Bay Area remains the undisputed center: it has 98,699 AI-skilled workers versus 67,949 in New York, and has drawn 80% of all US AI venture capital funding since 2020, according to Pitchbook and LinkedIn Talent Insights data cited in the CBRE report.
Nationally, AI-skilled tech workers grew 45% year-over-year to 751,000 across the US and Canada as of June 2026.
AI roles now account for 31% of all US tech talent job postings, up from just 11% at the mid-2022 peak. Meanwhile, the Bay Area's AI share has reached 57% of all local tech postings.
AI leasing boom signals demand in key housing markets
The physical footprint of the AI industry is expanding in ways that matter to brokers.
Tech companies accounted for 21% of all US and Canadian office leasing in the first half of 2026, up from 13% in 2023, according to CBRE.
AI companies drove 58% of San Francisco office leasing in that same period and have absorbed roughly 10 million square feet since 2023.
Brokers active in San Francisco's competitive housing market and mortgage landscape will recognize AI's role in sustaining demand that broader tech sector weakness might otherwise have softened.
Critically, AI companies operate with a heavily in-person workforce culture, a sharp contrast to the remote arrangements that temporarily depressed housing demand in gateway cities after 2020.
"It's more of the sort of startup innovation culture that we've seen, where people are in the office [a] minimum of four, but usually like five or six days a week," Yasukochi said.
"Through this whole innovation process, being together and working in person is just much more efficient and innovative."
That in-person mandate, combined with average New York Metro tech wages of $130,538 annually in 2024 and Bay Area tech wages averaging $195,142, sustains strong homebuying demand in markets where origination volumes and mortgage activity remain elevated.
Beyond the coastal hubs, emerging tech markets including Dallas-Ft. Worth, which added 37,230 tech workers between 2022 and 2025, along with Nashville (+12,540) and Charlotte (+8,420), are widening the geographic opportunity for originators to engage the next generation of AI-employed borrowers.
AI specialists earning average annual salaries of $130,538 in New York and $195,142 in the San Francisco Bay Area represent a concentrated pool of high-income, creditworthy borrowers whose geographic movement directly shapes origination opportunity.
When 30,640 net new tech workers land in the New York Metro and the finance sector absorbs the bulk of them, that is a measurable shift in where well-qualified buyers are house-hunting, where purchase loan demand is building, and where brokers should be deepening lender relationships and refining their product mix.
The same logic applies in reverse in San Francisco, where a net loss of 23,900 tech workers between 2022 and 2025 has cooled a market that once generated some of the country's largest loan balances.
Add the AI industry's strongly in-person work culture — which is pulling high earners back into gateway city housing markets after years of remote-driven dispersal — and the story becomes a forward-looking demand signal: the markets where AI companies are leasing office space today are the markets where mortgage volume is likely to follow.
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