nope - just a boring old swe.
Reviving this: How good is Los Altos Hills compared to Saratoga or Los Altos or PA?
In particular, for folks with elementary / middle school kids and like to send them to public schools is Los Altos Hills a fit? Is the demographic mainly older age rich folks or do they have families with little kids in the neighborhood? Do kids bike to school in groups using the Pathway systems?
Also, how good is Palo Alto school (Terman middle, Gunn High) that serves Los Altos Hills? Some times we hear that kids in these schools are super stressed, loaded with extra tuition / activities & don’t really have any time for play dates or neighborhood play.
My personal thought is “no” if you want your neighbors to have similar age group with you.
IMO, this is more common in PA & LA. For PA, it’s very well supported on the road as well as at school, you can check it out how big bike parking is at JLS.
I do hear it and was worried, but after I talked with a lot more neighbors who is going through or gone through Gunn (my kids are still in Elementary), I felt like it is more from the parents who is giving pressure than kids itself.
Thanks a lot @Boolean - more or less aligns with what I have inferred as well. Only thought I had was if there was a demographic change happening in LAH. May be not.
Mountain View is cheaper than PA/LA. But here is a small home in Mountain View with attached studio (built area of 1500 so ft in total I think for both units), sold for $2.9M.
Los Gatos/Saratoga offers better value for money than Mtn View/LA/PA. $2.8M still buys a lot of house in Los Gatos
Los Altos seems to be a crazy high real estate mini market. Someone just paid almost $4M essentially for a 13000 sq ft plot of land
Normally, big land at prime location with very old small home like this, Flipper cum Builder may pay such home, rebuild nice home with that big lot. They make up all the money when it sells nicely.
It seems, the location is very expensive place, rare to get homes with big lot.
https://www.redfin.com/CA/Los-Altos/598-Jay-St-94022/home/172925710
https://www.redfin.com/CA/Los-Altos/246-Angela-Dr-94022/home/879873
North of El Monte is the real los altos.
This lot has a good set of mature trees and needs quite some work to get it developed. 3.9M seems a bit steep and not sure if a developer would have done this. Most likely a wanna be flipper thinking it is a quick turn-around. Angela street property is much nicer location than this.
Small lot and not in the most desirable part of Mtn View. Yet, this house sold for more than $2.7M.
I guess this is what happens when too much printed money chases very few homes
Couple more super high price sales in Mountain View. RBA appears to not be slowing down…
Prices in Berkeley and Albany are off the chart. Some going 50% over. Near $1000/sf
Los Altos
This 5000 + sq ft house on a relatively small 11k lot sold for $8.5M - almost $1500 per sq ft.
Has the buyer gone nuts. Anywhere else in the world, except maybe Manhattan and prime Central London, they could have bought several acres with a huge mansion for this kind of money
North LA, aka the real LA.
8.5M is not that much for a high level exec in a tech company. Not my league obv just saying.
Sounds crazy, but you are probably right. Assuming that the buyer brings $3M in down payment (wow, that alone makes my head hurt!), and takes a mortgage of $5.5M @ 3%
Monthly mortgage (Principal + Int) = $23000 per month
Prop tax: $8500 per month
Insurance: $500 per month
PITI = $32000 per month or $384,000 per year.
I guess if annual income is $1M and above, one can qualify for a mortgage to buy the house.
Now, how many techies make more than $1M per year?
Probably not IC. Need to be in upper management.
What surprises me is it was bought with Redfin at 8.5M price range,
my guess is isn’t 3M in downpayment, buyer could be an IC with lots of stock. meaning 6M down, 2.5M loan. but the taxes, yes that person has to be able to sustain that.
How as an IC does one accumulate 6M worth of stock?
Remember that if you are cashing out 6M from stock, it probably would have been worth 9M pre-tax.
It is a stretch for an IC to accumulate even $1M in stock grants. Most ICs in standard companies get no stock
I know plenty of people (at least 15 in MY personal circle and I am not very well connected in SV world) who in the last year are sitting on anywhere from 20-50m of stock (Snowflake employees, Tesla employees, Snap, etc. So its not a stretch for them to sell some of it to put into RE for a personal house. Their stock grants did come earlier, meaning anywhere from 2 years ago (SNOW, Director of Product, to 6 years ago (Tesla, etc), so it isn’t a recent stock grant but accumulated,