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.
Please note that we don’t cover all 9 of the San Francisco Bay Area counties, but here you’ll find several of them covered, plus Santa Cruz County (“central coast” and still Silicon Valley) 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, touching the Bay on one side and the Pacific on the other. 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!
Santa Clara County
Santa Clara County, our home base, normally is the second priciest area in this region and is the heart of Silicon Valley:
Because Santa Clara County is our “home county”, we have additional info for this one. Read the PDF for the Santa Clara County newsletter here. This info is updated between the 5th and 10th of each month, so keep the link and use it monthly to keep current.
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, the northernmost county along the Monterey Bay. 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.
Alameda County
Alameda County is not an area we cover often, 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 people relocating to Silicon Valley 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. Commutability to major employers is another common denominator for higher home values. Other factors impacting price will be views of the hills or from the hills (low foothills, not super remote areas), proximity to services and amenities, attractive “downtown” or walkable areas. Cupertino has the high scoring schools and is a close in location for Apple employees (and not a far commute to some other big tech companies), 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
