At least that's the conventional wisdom. In Palo Alto, home of Stanford University and a number of startups (Facebook just recently left for Menlo Park), houses aregetting multiple offers.Even small houses in need of serious renovation canfetch more than $2 million.
But new statistics from Zillow suggest the picture is way more complicated than that.
In fact, housing values in Silicon Valley have DROPPED since last year. Specifically, housing values in the San Francisco urban area are down 4.5% from last year and down 0.6% between February and March, while prices in the San Jose urban area have dropped 0.3% since last year. (They were up 0.5% month to month.)
The catch is that prices and trends vary dramatically city by city. In San Francisco proper, and in towns near bigtechcompanies like Google and Facebook, prices are definitely rising.
And rents are going up everywhere.
Here's the fulldatafor the Bay Area, and several towns. The statistics are month over month, quarter over quarter, and year over year. We've added annotations about each town and bold-faced some of the most telling stats.
San Francisco Bay Area(a huge area including Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma counties)
Zillow HomeValue Index: $441,245
- MoM: -0.1%
- QoQ: -0.7%
- YoY: -2.9%
Zillow Rent Index: $2,312
- MoM: -0.3%
- QoQ: -0.5%
- YoY: +5.4%
Burlingame(a suburb halfway between San Francisco and Silicon Valley)
Zillow Home Value Index: $1,119,900
- MoM: -0.3%
- QoQ: +1%
- YoY: +10.7%
Zillow Rent Index: $3,607
- MoM: -1.2%
- QoQ: -3%
- YoY: +14.2%
Cupertino(the home of Apple, very near San Jose, about an hour south of San Francisco)
Zillow Home Value Index: $1,022,600
- MoM: +0.6%
- QoQ: +0.9%
- YoY: +1.6%
Zillow Rent Index: $3,423
- MoM: +0.6%
- QoQ: +2.7%
- YoY: +15.5%
Mountain View(home of Google, about 45 minutes south of San Francisco)
Zillow Home Value Index: $741,400
- MoM: +0.5%
- QoQ: +0.5%
- YoY: +5.1%
Zillow Rent Index: $2,944
- MoM: +0.4%
- QoQ: +0.2%
- YoY: +12.7%
Palo Alto(a wealthy suburb that's home to Stanford University, lots of VC firms, and some startups. Very close to Google and Facebook.)
Zillow Home Value Index: $1,289,600
- MoM: +1.7%
- QoQ: +3.5%
- YoY: +9%
Zillow Rent Index: $3,725
- MoM: +0.5%
- QoQ: -1.5%
- YoY: +3.9%
San Francisco(Twitter and a ton of other tech startups are now headquartered in S.F.)
Zillow Home Value Index: $654,100
- MoM: 0%
- QoQ: -1.2%
- YoY: -0.5%
Zillow Rent Index: $2,963
- MoM: -0.3%
- QoQ: +1.1%
- YoY: +13.7%
San Jose(The third-biggest city in California -- bigger than San Francisco -- has IBM, Cisco, Adobe, eBay, and many other well-established tech companies. was harder hit by the economic downturn than San Francisco, though.)
Zillow Home Value Index: $474,100
- MoM: +0.4%
- QoQ: -0.1%
- YoY: -2.2%
Zillow Rent Index: $2,427
- MoM: +0.2%
- QoQ: +0.9%
- YoY: +5.6%
Nationwide, Zillow saw a 0.5% increase in home prices between February and March -- the biggest increase since May 2006.
Now, here's Zillow's market statistics for the entire country by urban area, arranged in descending order of size. The company expects Sun Belt cities like Phoenix and Miami to have strong increases over the next year, but is still seeing declines in Atlanta and Chicago. Overall, though, it looks like most cities will reach bottom this year.
