This Sunday, the “What you can rent in..” column featured a SoMa furnished studio for $3500 and a San Francisco 2 bedroom apartment for $3700. Chances are, these apartments have been rented by now. While Manhattan, the most expensive rental market in the U.S., is roaring back to its peak prices, San Francisco doesn’t seem too far behind. We’ve written a few times about the housing market seeing pent up demand in certain areas of the bay, but the rental market is also feeling the heat too.

The Wall Street Journal wrote recently about renters eyeing to live in San Francisco scrambling and begging to sign a lease. Anecdotes of rental open houses are reminiscent of the the dot com era over a decade ago, when hopeful tenants created rental resumes and offered signing bonuses in order to compete for limited vacancies.

Some ran as short as 15 minutes, with crowds of other would-be tenants vying for sometimes lackluster digs. One 600-square-foot loft in the South of Market neighborhood that was “just basically a massive kitchen” listed for $3,200 a month, he says. Still, people were competing for the owner’s attention to submit a rental application. They were “backing him into a corner to see who could talk to him first…I thought there was going to be a fistfight.”

While rents in other parts of the country are rising around the pace of inflation, at 2.7%, the average rental price in San Francisco shot up by 15.8% from a year ago. Landlords are seeing the demand and acting accordingly, looking to mark up rents significantly when they can.

San Francisco rental-home owners and brokers say they are being deluged with applicants for apartments that would have barely gotten a nibble a year or two ago. Some property managers say they are boosting rental prices by 30% to 40% when units turn over.

It’s always been more expensive to buy than rent in San Francisco, but it looks like the rental market is starting to make up some ground.

Have you been shopping for a rental? What have you been seeing out there?