It can be challenging for people moving to Silicon Valley to get a sense of pricing for home buying. So to compare “apples to apples,” let’s take a hypothetical case of a 4 bedroom, 2 bath home of approximately 2,000 SF house (appx 185 square meters) and see how the cost looks in one area versus another.

Today I compared several cities and areas using the formula: single family homes of 1800 – 2200 SF, 3-5 bedrooms, 2-3 bathrooms, on lot sizes of 5000 SF to 10,000 SF that have sold within the last 30 days (short window of time due to price changes in the last 6 months or so – first dropping in the 2nd half of 2018, and now nosing up again).

DOM means “Days on Market”, the number of days a home was listed as available before pending.

Please note that this is a rough estimate of home prices. In many areas, cities, or towns, there can be multiple school districts. In those cases, the home price will be impacted by which school district the property is located within. (If you are interested in prices for similar homes a year or two ago, please also scroll down to find similar charts and data.)

I have arranged this chart in descending order by Sales Price. This is usually how I organize the data, and you can see certain markets shifting position, moving up or down the order depending on what’s hot. To compare, below is a report from April 3rd, 2019 using the same formula.

In the past, I’ve done similar studies, but using a larger window of time to even out any aberrations.

In most cases, the most expensive and desirable places have either the best schools or shortest commute location or both. Had I ranked these for school scores, you’d find that Cambrian is fairly high up and a good “bang for the buck” location – though not a super short commute for folks who work in Mountain View (though not so bad for people working in Cupertino). None of these is especially close to North San Jose (Cisco).

Palo Alto is a gorgeous, exciting area with all kinds of wonderful features – beautiful neighborhoods, lower crime, great schools, short commute. It is usually the most expensive area on this list.  But if you didn’t found a successful startup company or inherit a couple of million bucks, it can be hard to buy a single family home there. Many people would like to live in the shadow of Stanford University, but the budget just won’t allow it. What, then?

Please use the list above as a way to get your bearings on nearby areas in the South Bay (southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area). This is not an exhaustive list – it’s just most of the areas closest to Highway 85 or the West Valley Freeway. You can study various cities, downs, and districts within the region at my stats site, popehandy.rereport.com. (Free and you do not have to register unless you want email updates.)

Finally, it should be noted that one of the main drivers of home values is school districts. In the San Jose / Silicon Valley area, the school district boundaries do NOT follow the city or town boundaries. Los Gatos, for example, has 3 different elementary school districts, with varying scores which impact home values.  So too with Saratoga and many other areas, San Jose especially! All this to say that the figures above are only ROUGH GUIDES. When you break it down to micro-markets, the picture changes more. But as a starter guide, I think you’ll find the above info helpful to give you a general idea of how far your money can go in home buying for areas in Santa Clara County from Palo Alto to Blossom Valley.

Want to do a deep dive on any of these areas? Please visit my Valley of Heart’s Delight Blog to learn about them.

Historical comparisons of home prices in the same / similar areas

Here’s similar info from about 22 months ago (one change is that the lot sizes used before was a range of 6,000 to 10,000 SF, and in 2019 I went down to 5,000). I also thought it would be useful to share the number of sales represented, since obviously a small number may not be truly representative of home values in today’s market.

January 25, 2018: Continue reading →