Willow Glen is an interesting, varied, historic, scenic and upscale part of Silicon Valley.  It is convenient to downtown San Jose but has its own distinct history; even though it’s been part of the city of San Jose for nearly 75 years, ask a Willow Glen resident where he or she lives and the answer will be “Willow Glen”, not San Jose.

 I’ll use Altos Research for my source (a subscription I have & have the right to reproduce images etc here). Since 95% of Willow Glen is composed of 95125 zip code, that’s what we’ll use. The graphs below are dynamic so although I’m posting this in fall of 2009, the charts should be accurate in the future too. NB, Altos uses list prices. 

List prices for San Jose, 95125 over the last 12 months by price quartile:

Average days on market for San Jose, 95125 over the last 12 months by price quartile:

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It's frustrating to wait for a bank response on a distressed home you want to buy or sell!

A challenge we’re running into with the market weirdness is the deceptive status of listings in and around San Jose and Silicon Valley.  Sometimes a house or condo appears on the web to be a listing that’s available and ready for your offer, but in fact the agents are no longer accepting offers on the seller’s behalf.

Since a large percentage of our San Jose real estate sales consists of distressed properties (short sales or bank owned properties), the situation is more complicated than with a “normal sale” for many homes.  (Non-distressed listings gleefully proclaim, “this is a NORMAL sale! no bank approval needed!” because they know that serious buyers, particularly highly motivated ones, just want to buy a home without delays and games.) 

With distressed sales, the complications usually come in the way of bank involvement on the seller’s side (beyond just funding the buyer’s loan).
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The tide is turning for Silicon Valley real estate: fewer listings are coming onto the market and more homes are being purchased by homebuyers anxious to get into a house before interest rates rise and the $8000 first time homebuyer’s credit expires.

The shift is most visible in areas with the most affordability, but even is more upscale, higher priced areas, it’s still a noticeable change.

Today I’ll share with you a series of graphs, by area, of single family homes in terms of new listings, current inventory, and pending sales (sales under contract).  These were created using our mls system (information deemed reliable but not guaranteed).

Here’s the “key” (since if I put it alongside each image it would not fit without making all of it unreadable):

Description of each graph is ABOVE the image.

Almaden Valley (95120 area of San Jose) - this is a more expensive part of Santa Clara County, but the market improvement is very clear. Cool market.

Blossom Valley (95123 and 95136 zip codes, an area of San Jose) - this is a very affordable part of Silicon Valley and has taken a huge hit on the “price rollback”.  But it’s getting better now - note the rise in sales, low number of new homes coming on the market and overall lessening of inventory. Number of pendings is almost the same as the total inventory. Hot market.

Cambrian Park (95124 & 95118 area of San Jose) - trends among listings, inventory, and sales for single family homes. The trend of less inventory and more sales is quite evident. Warm market overall - very hot under $500,000, cool in higher price ranges. (But hot only if prices are deeply reduced.)

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“Red flags” are clues that something is wrong or potentially wrong. They’re the hints that we need to investigate something further, the sign that we should be on alert.

Some parts of San Jose, and Silicon Valley generally, enjoy beautiful older homes with classic styling and beautiful finishing work.  These properties and neighborhoods are prized because they are not cookie cutter, not ranch, not too new.  They may be Victorian, Craftsman, Spanish, or any number of other interesting architectural styles.

One area of Santa Clara County that is well known for both charming historic homes and unfortunately also some stuctural issues among those older houses is the Willow Glen district of San Jose.

On Saturday I showed some clients about a half dozen homes, all in Willow Glen, and we saw a lot of “red flags” which hinted of foundation problems, among others.  I thought I’d share a few pics I snapped at one of them with my treo camera here.  All of these were taken on the front porch of this house - all visible structural  “red flags” before we ever set foot into the house.
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Silicon Valley has wildly divergent real estate market conditions right now, and those swings are evident in the Willow Glen district of San Jose. As is the case elsewhere in Santa Clara County, the condo market has had a far rougher time of it than the single family home market.

The market for Willow Glen houses has been fairly close to a balanced market (6 months) for much of this year, though the general trend is in the buyers favor at this point and prices are down (see chart below).

The statistics, data and trends for single family homes in the Willow Glen Real Estate Market:

While the aborption rate for condos is far worse then for single family homes in Willow Glen, pricing is amazingly strong - down a very slight amount from a year ago (much less then with houses). That said, almost no condos are selling. So likely only the best of the best is selling and everything else goes unsold. So having strong prices but most homes not selling is no consolation to sellers.

This is a trend we are seeing in most of Silicon Valley, and in all types of homes. Buyers don’t want to fix up. They want turnkey.Statistics, data and trends for condominiums and townhouses in the Willow Glen Real Estate Market of San Jose:

If you are interested in buying or selling a home in Willow Glen, please call or email me. I’d be happy to offer you a free one hour consulation.

Located along the Guadalupe River and adjacent to downtown San Jose and resting against the borders of Campbell and the Cambrian Park area of San Jose, Willow Glen is a very charming, older part of San Jose and Silicon Valley that seems to beckon to a more gracious time.

The area’s centerpiece is Lincoln Avenue, a street bustling with cars and pedestrians alike. It’s filled to the brim with restaurants and shops and seems to attract a never-ending strea of visitors, especially in summer and during the holidays.

This place has a great sense of community and history too. Willow Glen was once its own town, until the need for being hooked up to the sewer system proved prohibitively expensive, and the residents voted to be annexed to San Jose in the 1920s. Ask someone from this district where he or she is from, and you won’t hear “San Jose”, but rather “Willow Glen”. It’s expected that you will know where that is!

Lovely, Older Architecture is a Hallmark of the Willow Glen area of San Jose

Much of Willow Glen was built early in the 1900s and so the homes in the “downtown” area are older and feature classical styles of housing on tree lined streets - Spanish, Craftsman, and some even more venerable and Victorian. That is surely a large part of its charm. On the edges of Willow Glen, the homes are newer and tract. One area, known as Palm Haven, has a myriad of palm trees (both Royal Palm and Fan Palm) and older, diverse architecture surrounding a community park. The original access to Palm Haven from Bird Avenue and the rest of Willow Glen has been blocked off, but the grand old road can still be found easily enough via Clintonia off Riverside.

In addition to the unique architecture and the draw of Lincoln Avenue in “downtown Willow Glen”, there are other features that make Willow Glen popular for visitors and those who want to live there too. One is the community involvement and the love of the arts. There are festivals and free music concerts and they are a popular draw! The pace seems to be a little slower here. Is it really? I’m not sure, but just seeing that people slow down enough to play Bocce Ball at a neighborhood park convinces me that things somehow just aren’t as hectic here.

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