How can you get the most “bang for your buck” with Silicon Valley homes when schools are your top priority?

Santa Clara County Realtors know that the performance of local schools is often the leading factor which drives housing values. Different families have different wants and needs, so sometimes it’s not all (or just) about the API scores. (On a related note, consumers please note that real estate agents aren’t API experts and we will not have the exact scores of all schools memoriezed, but we do know how to obtain that information online and elsewhere.)

Because school district boundaries are not identical to city boundary lines, often times there’s confusion about which neighborhoods belong to which school. By understanding this small quirk, you may be able to save many thousands of dollars.

For instance, Cupertino Schools are very highly regarded. But you may not have to be in Cupertino to enjoy the benefits of the district! Part of San Jose (in the 95129 zip code) is part of the Lynbrook High School area. Prices are noticeably lower with the San Jose address.

Likewise with the highly esteemed Los Gatos Schools, the boundaries of the district don’t line up with the town’s boundaries. Hard to imagine, but one little corner of San Jose (in Almaden Valley, off Guadalupe Mines Road) actually belongs to the Los Gatos School district. Homes are less costly in Almaden than in Los Gatos, so this is another great bargain if schools are the most important thing to you.

There are less dramatic examples too, such as homes with a Los Gatos mailing address belonging to Saratoga schools, or Los Altos homes being in the Cupertino school area.

Experienced agents, like those of us at Luxor Real Estate Group, know about some of these “fine points” in Silicon Valley real estate and our knowledge can provide you with a distinct advantage in home buying. Please call us today for help in getting started or continuing your homebuying.

No, sorry, there aren’t a lot of distressed homes for sale in the Saratoga and Los Gatos areas.  Would be bargain hunters email me regularly, hoping to find lots and lots of short sales and bank owned (REO - real estate owned by the bank) houses for sale in high end west valley neighborhoods.

There just aren’t many of them!

As of today, in Los Gatos (95030 and 95032 zip codes) and Saratoga (95070) , there are 185 single family homes (houses, perhaps a few “duet homes”) for sale.  Of the 185, a mere 14 of them are distressed properties (6 bank owned, 8 short sale).  That is just 7.5%!  For those who want Los Gatos or Saratoga Schools (not Campbell, Union, or Cupertino), the odds are even worse.  Only two of those homes go to the Los Gatos-Saratoga High School District. (Prices of all distressed properties currently available in these areas range from $699,000 to about $3 million.)

There are some good deals to be found in addition to this very small pool of bank owned properties and short sale listings in Saratoga and Los Gatos.  Often the best deals are found among homes which have been on the market a long time but aren’t selling due to cosmetic issues.  Homes which need changes such as fresh carpet, paint, or “easy” updating and remodeling (like new countertops, light fixtures, etc.) can be the best bargains around, particularly if the seller is truly motivated.  So don’t lose heart - just broaden your strategy a little and you’ll be far more able to locate a suitable home.

This week one of my buyers asked me about the inventory levels in Santa Clara County (San Jose, specificially) and wondered if they’re lower than usual.  I get this question a lot lately so wanted to present the numbers to the readers of this Valley of Hearts Delight Blog. 

How low is the inventory? It’s way off from last year in most parts of the west valley. But remember, last year was unusual.  (Below are the numbers for single family homes, or houses.)

How much is this year’s inventory off from the average of the last 6 years?

Almaden: down appx 10%
Cambrian: down appx 18%
Campbell: down appx 20%
Los Gatos: up appx 6%
Saratoga: up appx 38%

Once again, “easy answers” allude us. 

If we were to push this further, we’d find that certain price points (or bands or strata) in the market are way above or below the typical numbers.  It is very hard to generalize accurately.  Anecdotally, though, it seems as though there’s very little on the market as far as my buyers are concerned (and right now, my buyers are looking at properties in Santa Clara County ranging from the 400s to between 1 and 2 million). 

For information on your particular situation, please contact me.

Do you like to browse Los Gatos homes for sale by neighborhood and by map? Get a bird’s eye view of what’s for sale, and for how much, in different parts of Los Gatos. Search by home type (condo, house, townhome), size, number of bedrooms and other criteria. The “shop by map” feature is available on my PopeHandy.com website. Have a look today!

View Los Gatos homes for sale (listed on the MLS).

The Alta Vista neighborhood, which sits along the border of Los Gatos and the Cambrian Park district of San Jose, is very highly sought after and valued for many, many reasons. Real estate prices vary depending upon the precise location within the neighborhood as well as the size and condition of the home.

Why is this area so popular?  Most of the streets close to Alta Vista School are beautifully tree-lined, and from virtually everywhere in the neighborhood, you are close to Blossom Hill (that’s the name of the hill, not just the name of the road!).  Homes are well kept, streets are wide enough, and except when there’s a school function, there really aren’t too many cars on the street. It is very scenic, pleasant and uncrowded feeling.  Although you’re in the city or town, you feel close to the country there.

Additionally, many homebuyers select this area because the school scores are high and because it’s easy to get to the elementary and middle schools without crossing any major streets: that is a big plus!  It is also a quick drive to highway 85, just a couple of miles to the Los Gatos shopping areas (at Los Gatos Blvd and Blossom Hill Road) or to Vasona Lake County Park.  For many, it’s a way to be close to Los Gatos while paying less expensive San Jose prices.

Prior to being developed for housing, this spot at the base of Blossom Hill was once blanketed in orchards and was scenic enough that it was part of the “blossom tours” that used to take place at the height of the flowering.  Hence, one large section of this neighborhood has street names that begin with “blossom”.

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Locals to the San Jose area (Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County) know, and newcomers often do not, that we have mico-climates here. Our weather is mild everywhere, of course - we enjoy a “sub tropical climate” where citrus grows and palm trees thrive - but it varies a lot nonetheless.

What kind of variation exists in Santa Clara County’s weather?

Consider that our terrain is shaped somewhat like a funnel with the San Francisco Bay

View Larger Map

Together with our funnel shaped valley, the Pacific Ocean and the San Francisco Bay are the major influencers on our climate. The Santa Cruz Mountains are warmer and wetter than the eastern foothills. The Pacific Ocean brings in the rain, fog and winds pulling storms in from the ocean to the valley. Much of the weather stops at or near the coastal mountains, though, and the influence lessens as you go east such that the east foothills are very, very different from the Santa Cruz Mountains. The areas close to the bay get more breezes than those sheltered by smaller valleys or nooks.

Here are a few basic notes for newcomers:
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CC & Rs are “Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions“  (sometimes “Covenants, Codes & Restrictions).  They are a set of rules drawn up for a neighborhood or subdivision by the builder or by a board comprised of the builder and a few others who want to set the neighborhood standards to keep property values up.

The C, C & Rs  are put in place, usually for a set number of years such as for 30 or 35 years, and most of the homes in Silicon Valley do have CC & Rs and most of them are now expired.   It’s always for a finite period of time, though usually extendable if the neighbors vote it in again (which I have never seen done), but sometimes gauged by something perhaps not so predictible.  The weirdest time line I ever saw referenced something like “until the death of the last living great grandchild of…” and it mentioned one of the Kennedys. Odd, but apparently legit.

What are the CC & Rs about?

Here’s a peek at part of one -

Usually the CC & Rs dictate the minimum size of a home (e.g., the home must be at least “X” number of square feet)  that may be built in the subdivision, the setbacks (homes must be so many feet from the street and property lines), what kind of signage may appear (only for sale and for rent signs, for instance), and normally there’s a restriction on farm animals so that people may not raise goats, sheep, chickens and so on in their backyards or breed animals professionally.

Many years ago, some C, C & Rs also had restrictions on who might buy or live in a neighborhood (racial, religious and other restrictions).  This is illegal today, of course, and so the first page of any C C and R document you see now will have a large disclaimer stating that any fair housing violations are illegal and are null & void. Since the C C & Rs “run with the property”, they supposedly cannot be amended (though I have never been convinced that they couldn’t be - just that the government chooses to require the disclaimer instead).

Do the C C & Rs matter?

For the most part, they are irrelevant because in most of Santa Clara County, they have long since expired.

They can be a little helpful, though, as sometimes the setbacks (which may still be enforceable) may be stated more clearly than in the preliminary title report or elsewhere.

Often, too, they hide some historically interesting tidbits. Today I read the C C & Rs for a Leep built home (a very good builder of tract housing in the Santa Clara Valley) in the Cambrian Park area of San Jose.  I know that there’s an area of Campbell (that has a Los Gatos mailing address) with Leep homes;  one street in this area near the Saratoga and Los Gatos border is named Elwood and another Bearden. Today I learned that there were two builders of these homes, Elwood J. Leep and Leonard Bearden, Sr. So that was a fun tidbit - I have sold many “Leep homes” over the years, have known them to be well built but never had the builders’ first names before.

To summarize, in most cases, the C C & Rs won’t provide you with a lot of helpful information, but do try to obtain them anyway when buying a home in Santa Clara County. There may be information that is interesting, if not necessarily useful - and you never know, there may be a tidbit of helpful information buried in there along with the strange admonitions that homes not cost less than $10,000 when sold. That’s the least of our worries today!