March 31, 2008
Median Home Prices and Sales in Santa Clara County
This week, the San Jose Mercury News has released its monthly data showing home prices and sales throughout the Silicon Valley. Upon reviewing this extensive data, we see some clear trends and information that home buyers can use in planning their next purchase.
Areas with good school districts such as Cupertino and Los Gatos appear relatively unaffected by the current home price plunges. Cupertino shows a 6.9% increase in price per square foot. Los Gatos shows a 1-3% increase based on area code, but Mountain View showed a whopping 66% increase in price per square foot in the prestigious 94040 area code. Children in this district attend Mountain View High - which has shown dramatic improvement in test scores and other accolades in the past several years.
Most San Jose area codes have shown a plunge in per square foot prices - with some reprieve shown those close to and zoned into prestigious Campbell, Los Gatos, or Cupertino school districts.
It is clear that as a Bay Area community - the quality of our children’s education rates second to none!!!
Another telling statistic is that sales of older homes continue to decline - resale home prices across Santa Clara County fell by 44.6%, while prices of newer homes have only declined by 40.3%. Is this number statistically significant? Most statisticians would say that it isn’t - but I think it shows that at least some buyers view newer homes as being more energy and power efficient, and more worthy of investment in these tough times.
Red said:
Wow, the Mercury really made a mess of formating that for the web, it is much easier to read in the paper. I think you might have misread some of the data as a result.
Resale home Sales, NOT prices, have fallen by 44.6%, new homes by 40.3%, and condos by 54.1%.
If those were numbers for prices it would be total carnage… The new home numbers probably suffer less because the builder will do whatever it takes to get a place sold, including interest rate buydowns, free options, increased broker %…
Cupertino is interesting, the drop in sales is a whopping 56.5%; makes the 6.9% increase in the median just random noise; obviously, buyers just won’t pay the price sellers are asking.
April 1, 2008 2:06 PM
Brenda Keener said:
I apologize if I misread this data, and will contact the Merc to find out the truth. I tried to go to the Dataquick site to find the real formatted data, but it appears to be pay only.
April 1, 2008 10:32 PM