Yes. Well, yes if you assume decent credit and some cash saved up for a down payment. The conventional 20% wisdom can be safely ignored as a relic from the 1950s in the Bay.

It's definitely possible to buy a condo or detached house in Oakland for the 400k-700k that would likely be affordable on that salary. The condo, probably a one-bedroom might be a decade or less old, the house much more likely to be older, and probably not insanely distant from BART. This means reasonable access to SF, but annoying to get further south to the peninsula.

"The conventional 20% wisdom can be safely ignored as a relic from the 1950s in the Bay."

Curious what you mean by that - too high or too low? What do folks actually put down?

Anecdotally, I've seen both - I have friends that put down ~40-50% down, have heard of foreign buyers paying all-cash on multiple homes, but also have heard of people really stretching with 5% or 10% down mortgages to afford a home.

To clarify, I mean that the old wisdom that you can only buy if you can put 20% down does not apply in the same sense that it is voices.

50% down is wonderful! But it's likely most engineers would be unable to manage that. The same is true of all-cash.

5% or 10% down is workable, and finding loans compatible with that will not be difficult if you are willing to work lenders familiar with local market conditions. PMI will generally be required, but it isn't likely to be nearly as expensive as people might expect (think 0.5%-1% of total loan amount). Further, odds are against our hypothetical engineer being able to work up a 20% downpayment on a property they want in a short enough timeframe that it does not appreciate out of reach. Finally, the people resting their dreams of homeownership on a major property price crash in the Bay to afford a 20% downpayment should not be emulated, as they are banking on an unlikely event and assuming they will be correctly positioned to take advantage.

In short, high recurring cashflow can reasonably be used to make up for a comparatively low amount of liquid cash, and this is often preferable to the other options people might choose to pursue.

Knowing what people put down with any certainty is not something I am able to do. I can just say that the old wisdom is sufficiently dated that it should be ignored by prospective homebuyers in the Bay.

you were able to do it in 2014 on the $208K. The 2018 equivalent of those $208K - a principal at a hot company is $450-$550 (Google's L5-L6 medians) and it does allow to buy very nice townhouse in MV/PA/SNVL or even a modest home.