Silicon Valley Real Estate Blog – 1SiliconValley.com

There is a new luxury development that has been getting a lot of attention lately because of its location and close proximity to downtown Mountain View.  Not only is it close to the downtown area, but it is also within walking distance to the Mt. View Caltrain station, has freeway access close-by, and is surrounded by single family homes, parks, the Center for the Performing Arts and City Hall offices.  The Wild Orchid development is located on the corner of Dana Street and Calderon Avenue.

The exclusiveness to this area is because of the very convenient location to downtown.  It is only a ½ mile walk to the heart of where all the action is; downtown restaurants, unique shops, night clubs, coffee shops, and independent book stores are just a few of the niceties.  And if you get in now to one of these homes you won’t have to fight the parking situation of the ever-so-popular Mountain View Art and Wines Festival, coming September 7-8, 2008.

The builder of Wild Orchid development is Castle Companies, which is a family owned and operated builder in Northern California .  They have been around since 1966 and are recently building communities as far north as Yolo County , Napa Valley , down the East Bay and now into the Peninsula , which brings us to the Wild Orchid community.  The naming of these communities is as unique as each setting where these new developments are being built. 

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May.16.2008 [ Filed under: Mountain View, Silicon Valley News ] Comment Here »

Higher interest rates for jumbo mortgages is a story for another day, but it does color how home owners should read what I’m about to write.  In July, Mountain View experienced a 14% jump in the median for single-family homes from 2006 to 2007.  There was also the fact that the percent of list received went from almost full value (99.28%) to 104.4%.

Like many other places in Silicon Valley, like Sunnyvale and Cupertino with their Eichlers and San Mateo with its older homes near downtown, among others, Mountain View has its share of older homes.  Many of these homes come on larger lots that give ambitious owners room for expansion.  One of this month’s Median Homes illustrates that potential.

Mountain View is a unique environment because of the money from one local company in particular and it was a competitive summer season — as you’ll see, though, not every property experienced the same level of interest.

[ Median Home 2007, 2006 | Market Snapshot | How Much Home Can I Get? ]

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Aug.29.2007 [ Filed under: Market Updates, Mountain View ] 2 Comments »

Bedford Square (see previous update and writeup) has announced their next sales release (Saturday, April 21 at 9am) and updated pricing.  10 units are available, with an approximate delivery in December this year or January 2008.

There are four floorplans.  Plan 1 units are listed at 1,223 square feet with 2 bedrooms and 2.5 baths.  This release sees four Plan 1 units at $673,900 to $678,900.  On their February 17 release — I keep track of these things — Plan 1 units ranged from $659,900 to $666,900.  Here's my amateur video of the entryway and downstairs, then the video upstairs:

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Apr.19.2007 [ Filed under: Mountain View, Sunnyvale ] Comment Here »

Bedford Square (link) is a townhome community located on the border of Mountain View and Sunnyvale, close to 237.  Pulte, the developer, is sending out messages about the grand opening of the model homes there this Saturday. 

Their phone number is 650-625-1850.  Before visiting, you can have a look at our previous write-up, find homes around Bedford Square, or contact me to run a current market analysis of the properties in and around that area.

Apr.13.2007 [ Filed under: Mountain View, Sunnyvale ] Comment Here »

The California Department of Education (CDE) has released the updated 2006 Academic Performance Index (API) scores for California schools, including data for San Mateo County and Santa Clara County.  The API is a statewide benchmark based on standardized achievement tests which is primarily used to rank schools relative to one another and relative to schools with similar demographics.  Here’s an example of what the statistics look like.

We’ll take a look at how school rankings and Silicon Valley real estate prices are related, but first let’s look at how to read the information.

Number of Students. In the first column, you’ll find the number of students whose results were included from that school.  It’s pretty close to the total number of students, less any excluded students.  The rules for excluding students are listed in the API Base Documentation Information Guide found on the CDE API page.  Surprisingly, the number of students has little to do with how well the school did in its API scores (almost, see epilogue).

Base API, Statewide Rank, Similar Schools Rank. The Base API score is like an SAT score except it’s from 200 to 1000.  Higher is better.  To make comparing schools easier, the CDE provides a statewide rank from 1 to 10 (ten is best) and a similar schools rank that rates schools (again from 1 to 10, ten being best) that have similar demographics and characteristics.  Apples-to-apples in a way.

Growth Target, API Target. The growth target is the number of points California wants the school to improve in the next year.  That added with the current base API score equals the API target.  The CDE doesn’t set a target for schools above the current statewide performance target of 800.

Silicon Valley School District Scores

I’ve assembled information from the CDE site and the Palo Alto Daily News to provide a table of school district API averages for Silicon Valley and Bay Area elementary and middle schools.

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Mar.31.2007 [ Filed under: Cupertino, Foster City, Home Buyers, Market Updates, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Mateo, Schools, Sunnyvale ] 7 Comments »

I'd completely forgotten and now I was regretting it.  I pulled in past the gate to Shoreline Park, which hasn't been manned in years — or at least I hadn't seen anyone there — and into the parking lot where they fly all those beautiful kites on Saturday afternoons.  

You can see the giggling children and the families gathered around a wound-up piece of string as it's whipped through the air by the acrobatics of its airborne companion. 

At least the people who could find parking could.  Me?  I'd forgotten that there's only one way in or out of this parking lot and, since I'd pulled all the way through, I was about to take the hardest driving test I'd had to face since parallel parking as a 15 year-old: reversing 50 yards past families with toddlers hypnotized by the mylar tails of kites gone by.  It turned out to be worth it. 

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Mar.23.2007 [ Filed under: Activities, Mountain View ] Comment Here »

As we stood under the cathedral ceiling looking over the stone-tiled patio, we could hear the owner and his son playing their XBox in one of the bedrooms.  It was penned off from the rest of the house so that Cujo wouldn't get loose. 

I thought the top-level townhome was in pristine condition considering they had a Cujo, until I peered into the room and saw a tiny 10-pound pug sitting attentively in front of the television!

There were network connections wired into every room, and this being Silicon Valley, we asked the owner if it was standard CAT-5 or CAT-5e.  The gentleman, in his decidedly French accent, said with a bit of sheepishness, "You know, I'm not sure."  (He was a little redfaced because we'd talked about his job at Cisco.) 

So I asked whether he had a wireless network and his face lit up.  He hopped over to the storage closet in the entryway and eagerly showed off the router, neatly and carefully wired into the connectivity panel.  He didn't check for CAT-5e because he didn't need it.

The network drops were a "nice-to-have" for my client who does a lot with multimedia.  They weren't a dealmaker (and as he discovered not a dealbreaker) but given that this was the first home he'd seen as a potential buyer, he was eager to get some experience looking at houses under his belt so that he could really experience firsthand what his requirements feel like.

In the back of people's minds, most people start off with a list of requirements that I rank order informally using the "MoSCoW" method:

• Must: What they know they want
• Should: What they think they want
• Could: What they don't have strong feelings about
• Won't: What they don't want

For any number of reasons, what people say they want doesn't always line up with what they really want in their minds and hearts. 

A lot of times that's because of the difference between theory and application: being able to actually drive the commute or experience how many flights of stairs there are gives people a clearer picture of "could" vs. "won't".

The tricky part is separating the borderline "must-haves" from the "shoulds."  And with my client in the early stages of his home search, we needed to setup a stable foundation so that we'd learn those differences from every property he would see on the rest of his search.

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Mar.22.2007 [ Filed under: Cupertino, Foster City, Home Buyers, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Real Estate Stories, San Mateo, Sunnyvale ] 1 Comment »

While folks are moving into the Bedford Square master-planned community in July, they've already sold out the first of their six phases.  Its location in Mountain View right along the border of neighboring Sunnyvale is close to many major employers in the Silicon Valley.

Even in the rain that day, it was a noticeably short walk to Verisign headquarters, Symantec (formerly Veritas headquarters), Vernier Networks, and KPMG.  Though driving there from Bedford Square would make even the least green people in California feel guilty, Bedford Square is tucked away so that it doesn't feel like an extension of the office.

The local VTA station and local bus stop pictured above are close as well, right outside the KPMG office, but far enough away where there is no noise impact.  And the Silicon Valley Public Transportation Wizard helps make using it practical.

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Mar.02.2007 [ Filed under: Mountain View, Neighborhoods, Sunnyvale ] Comment Here »