by Mary Pope-Handy, Clair Handy | May 13, 2023 | Market reports
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.

For three of these counties, we have a newsletter with info by city. The data from Sereno (above) is pretty 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.
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by Mary Pope-Handy, Clair Handy | Feb 21, 2023 | San Jose, Almaden Valley, Blossom Valley, Cambrian, Communities, Downtown San Jose, Willow Glen

What does it cost to buy a single family home in the city of San Jose? There are many San Jose districts and their values vary by about 2-to-1 from the highest to lowest priced areas in this large, sprawling city with about 1,000,000 residents.
In this article we’ll take a look at the main, fairly well defined districts and discuss the cost of purchasing a house in each one. After each small description, there’s a link to a post on my popehandy.com website for that area.
You can also find relevant information on my Valley of Heart’s Delight blog, SanJoseRealEstateLosGatosHomes.com – just click on the “Neighborhoods” link.
Lastly, if you’d like to see a map of where these parts of SJ are located, please click on this link to find this article with a helpful map: San Jose is big and sprawling: where are the districts?
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by Mary Pope-Handy | Mar 20, 2016 | Buying Tips, FAQs
Moving across the state, country, or globe always presents opportunities – but also challenges. What are the biggest hurdles for people moving to Silicon Valley?
The cost of housing is the # 1 challenge for newcomers to Silicon Valley
For most people, the hardest issue is the cost of housing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Whether buying or renting, it’s extremely costly here. Depending on where you’re coming from, it could be man, many times more expensive. Finding affordable housing is the # 1 challenge for people relocating to Silicon Valley.
How does it compare to other places? It is close to on par with New York City, about 50% more expensive than Austin, TX, and about 1/3 more than Chicago, IL. Check Sperling’s Cost of Living comparison to get a good sense of how it relates to your current home town.
Not only are the houses, condominiums, townhouses and apartments more expensive, but most of our homes are smaller too. (more…)