Today we’ll provide a few quick graphics to give you a Silicon Valley pricing snapshot on the counties where we sell homes. These will be ranked by the usual order of housing cost, from highest to lowest. (Sometimes they move “out of order”.) After that, we’ll provide more resources from our other sites and blogs with a deeper dive on our main Silicon Valley real estate markets. We don’t cover all 9 of the San Francisco Bay Area counties, but here you’ll find 3 of them covered, and it’s a pretty good primer on the Bay Area housing market analysis.
Silicon Valley Pricing Snapshots
San Mateo County
San Mateo County is “The Peninsula”, the county just south of San Francisco and north of Santa Clara County and Santa Cruz County. About a quarter of Silicon Valley is in this area, generally. It’s normally more expensive than Santa Clara County, but once in awhile those two areas flip for pricing order. It’s a hot market in San Mateo County!
For three of these counties, we have a newsletter with info by city. The data from Sereno (above) is a little different from the RE Report data for the median sale price.
Santa Clara County
Santa Clara County, our home base, is the second priciest area in this region and is the heart of Silicon Valley:
And the city by city market stats (much closer aligned for this county between the two data sets):
We also do monthly market updates on communities within the Santa Clara County and more on our other blogs. Check out some of those market reports through the link.
Santa Cruz County
Just south of Santa Clara County lies Santa Cruz County. While San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties are considered Northern California, Santa Cruz County is part of the Central Coast region. It’s always a little more affordable than Silicon Valley. (Scotts Valley is a part of Santa Cruz County and also Silicon Valley, which has blurry boundaries at best.) Scotts Valley and perhaps Santa Cruz are part of Silicon Valley.
Again, the numbers from Sereno and from the RE Report are close here. By city:
Read more about the markets in the above areas in our article: Market Reports for Three Silicon Valley Counties.
Alameda County
Alameda County is not something we cover much, but sometimes we help buyers or sellers in Fremont or Newark. Here’s that county’s Silicon Valley pricing snapshot.
Contra Costa County
We don’t normally go that far out from Silicon Valley, but some consumers may be interested in how these numbers stack up, so we are including them here.
In general, areas will be more expensive if they have exceptionally good public schools. Other factors impacting price will be views of the hills or from the hills (low foothills, not super remote areas), proximity to work places, attractive “downtown” or walkable areas. Cupertino has the high scoring schools and a close in location for Apple employees, making it highly desirable and one of the most expensive areas in Silicon Valley.
Los Altos Hills in Santa Clara County is at the very pinnacle of costliness. That city has 1 acre minimum lot sizes and many of the homes are 5,000 square feet or more. The schools are shared with neighboring Los Altos (which is a separate city) and they are excellent. For people working in Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, or nearby, Los Altos Hills is generally fairly nearby. That said, some homes are deep into the hills and it may take awhile just to get down to more main roads.
The other factors impacting real estate sale prices may include things such as the interest rates and Silicon Valley stock prices. When tech stocks fall, it does impact how much local tech workers can afford to pay for their homes or investment properties.
Additional Silicon Valley Pricing Snapshot Resources:
We have a real estate statistics website, The RE Report, which covers three counties: Santa Clara, San Mateo, and Santa Cruz. Alameda County has a different MLS system and we don’t work there too much, but on occasion we do. The home page for the RE Report is Santa Clara County, but from there you can navigate to the others. Further, from there you can navigate to cities and in some cases, such as San Jose, districts within the cities.
Santa Clara County real estate market – on SanJoseRealEstateLosGatosHomes, aka the Valley of Heart’s Delight blog – comprehensive post updated monthly. This is our main Silicon Valley real estate blog
San Jose real estate market analysis – on SanJoseRealEstateLosGatosHome.com
Los Gatos real estate market trends and statistics – on Live in Los Gatos blog
