The Oaktree Park neighborhood in San Jose is a scenic residential community with wide appeal to home buyers due to good Almaden schools, close proximity to large parks and is one of only a few areas in Almaden Valley which includes a cabaña and swim team.  Additionally, this area is very convenient as it’s  close to schools, shops and commute routes to downtown San Jose and much of Silicon Valley. It is a fairly intimate neighborhood with 156 homes.

Where is the Oaktree Park neighborhood?

The Oaktree Park subdivision is within the boundaries of Meridian Avenue, Redmond Avenue and Mcabbe Road on three sides and the Jeffrey Fontana Park on the north side.

The census bureau (and perhaps also the city of San Jose) has attributed names to some parts of Almaden and this neighborhood falls into the Crossgates section.  I do not believe that most residents refer to this area that way, though.  Perhaps more likely they’d call it part of the greater Fontana Park neighborhood.

Oaktree Park Neighborhood in San Jose (Almaden Valley area of SJ) - click on image above to go to live Google Map

What schools serve the Oaktree Park neighborhood in San Jose?

The public schools for Oaktree Park are within the San Jose Unified School District:

Los Alamitos Elementary School (API 916 in 2010)
Castillero Middle School (API 806 in 2010)
Pioneer High School (API 823 in 2010)

Los Alamitos Elementary and Holy Spirit Elementary (Catholic) are both just a couple of blocks from Oaktree Park.  Additonally there are 2 preschools really close too:  Precious Preschool and Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Preschool.

For more information and links for schools, school districts, API scores and maps of boundaries lines for schools in the Almaden area of San Jose, please also read:

Schools, API Scores & Maps of School Boundaries in San Jose’s Almaden Valley

What are homes like in Oaktree Park?

Homes in Oaktree Park are single family dwellings – all detached houses (no townhouses or condominiums).  These are primarily ranch style or two story ranch style houses, built in the early 1970s  on lots of about 8000 to 9000 square feet, though a few are more than that.  Interior size runs between about 1600 square feet to about 3000 square feet (if added on). Prices may be in the mid 600s for a smaller home, needing work and a less desirable location (such as on a busy road or immediately adjacent to the high voltage power lines that run through the park) to perhaps a little over a million dollars for a beautifully updated or rebuilt larger home in an ideal location within the neighborhood.

Oaktree Park Neighborhood Home for Sale: 6064 Ostenberg Drive

This week I put a fabulously remodeled and expanded Oaktree Park neighborhood home on the market!  This exquisite house has an awesomely open floorplan with an amazing kitchen – a gourmet’s delight!  Have a look at the details! Open Sat/Sun, April 21-22, 2012 1-4pm. (more…)

How common are “all cash” transactions for Silicon Valley real estate right now?  Throughout Santa Clara County, they were 25% of all sales, up from 20% in October 2011,  among houses, duet homes, condominiums and townhouses (class 1 and class 2, does not include mobile homes, 2-4plex or apartment buildings or raw land).   What’s trending? Lots, including more cash offers.

Some areas and some types of sales are more frequently all cash than others.  Here are a few quick stats for the last month (last 30 days from today – numbers from MLSListings, crunched by me – disclaimer on good intentions but no guarantee). Also, please note that this is for CLOSED SALES. As of this writing, we are seeing a huge uptick in multiple offers in all price ranges in many parts of the valley, and it seems that many are all cash or very large cash downpayments.

• Santa Clara County: 25% all cash
• San Jose (entire city): 27% all cash
• San Jose short sales: 27% all cash (down from 33% in Oct 2011)
• San Jose bank owned or REO sales: 39% all cash (38% Oct 2011)
• Short sales & REOs were 52% of all sales in San Jose in last 30 days (was 48% Oct 2011)
• Of SJ homes listed at $300,000 or less: 44% all cash (was 48% Oct 2011)
• Of SJ homes listed at/under $500,000: 33% were all cash (didn’t track in October 2011)
• Los Gatos: 9% all cash
• Saratoga: 8% all cash
• Almaden Valley area of San Jose: 10% all cash

Some of these sales will have no financing and the new owners will occupy the home.  Particularly in lower priced homes, though, these are investor buyers who will be renting out the property.  This is often the case with the lower price distressed properties in particular.  In higher priced homes, some new owners will put financing on the property after close of escrow.

With the crazy new demands that keep coming at us from banks and new requirements being imposed on appraisers, now more than ever, cash is king.  That doesn’t mean that the cash buyer will get a deep discount, but there will be a slight one in most cases and certainly preferential treatment that will create a great advantage in multiple offer situations.

Learn more about buying and selling Silicon Valley real estate with cash offers:

Cash offers: what do you need to know if buying “all cash”?

Q & A: Making an Offer

What’s My Silicon Valley Home Worth? Estimating the Probable Buyer’s Value  (financing impacts market value)

How’s the real estate market in San Jose’s Almaden Valley? Commentary and statistics…..

It’s actuallya lot hotter than the numbers for the Almaden closed sales in February might indicate; the last 2-3 weeks have seen a heat-up the likes of which I have not seen since 2000. Many properties are selling fast, sometimes with multiple offers.  We are experiencing this trend throughout the west valley areas: Los Gatos, Saratoga, Cupertino, Palo Alto and on up the Peninsula.  These multiple offers are pushing prices higher. In many cases, it is much higher.  I’m seeing some overbids of more than $100,000 in some cases as well as offers with no contingencies for loan or home inspection. Listing agents sometimes write in their private MLS comments for other agents “no pre-emptive offers“.

What’s driving it?  There are years of pent up demand in which would-be home buyers sat on the fence, either because they expected further price drops or because, in the case of move-up buyers, they didn’t have enough equity to budge.  With record low interest rates and prices creeping up – combined with an infusion of cash from high tech employees with either great stock prices (Apple) or an IPO (LinkedIn, Facebook, Yelp, and more), there’s the classic case of more demand than supply. 

Almost every offer I’ve been involved with over the last month has been a multiple offer situation, whether in south San Jose, Blossom Valley, Cambrian, Los Gatos, or Saratoga.  Prices from $400,000 to $1,800,000 – all at least 5 offers, sometimes far more.  As Chris Trappani, the CEO and founder of Sereno Group says, “we’re seeing it now – the papers will report on it in a month”.

Stats for the Almaden real estate market for houses in February 2012 (click on link to see more info):

Note that the median sales price is up almost 15% from January and the average price rose 7% month over month. Year over year it’s not so good but from what we are seeing, it’s unlikely to look like this when the March 2012 numbers roll in.  Also note the jump in pending sales and the lower number of actives – less inventory, more absorption.

The annual market report is out at popehandy.REReport.com and we can now learn how 2011 compared to 2010.  The median sales price for houses in Santa Clara County was off 5.3% overall.  But from one part of the valley to the next it varied wildly with 6 cities or areas finding themselves in positive territory while others were off by double digits.

In the image to the left, I’ve put into bold the cities where the median sales price of houses which sold and closed escrow in 2011 were ahead of 2010′s pricing.

What is it that makes Gilroy, Los Altos Hills, Los Gatos, Mountain View and Palo Alto “in the black”?

Most of these cities/towns are upscale, west valley communities.  But so are Saratoga, Cupertino, and Monte Sereno.

Gilroy was especially hard-hit with the housing downturn so perhaps in that case, it’s just coming back into more of a balance. (Then again, so was Morgan Hill and it’s still off by 12%.)

The LinkedIn IPO and others in the Palo Alto area drove prices up for some parts of the housing market nearby and it’s likely that this explains the positive growth for Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Los Altos Hills.  That said, it would seem that Los Altos, and perhaps even Sunnyvale would have seen stronger numbers on the same account.  Perhaps school scores are the key driver here.

Los Gatos, Saratoga and Monte Sereno often behave somewhat similarly as they are adjacent to one another and often attract similar home buyers who want good schools, a nice downtown area nearby and scenic beauty with the hills.  The annual numbers show Monte Sereno down 6.7%, Saratoga down 2% but Los Gatos up 6.4%.  With Monte Sereno, there are very few sales each month and each year (only about 4,000 residents), so there can be a wider swing without it necessarily being accurate. Saratoga and Los Gatos each have about 30,000 people who call these areas home, though, so the data is much more helpful.  Saratoga and Los Gatos both have multiple school districts, views, homes with better proximity to “downtown” and more variables – I think we’d have to dig a lot deeper to learn why these two neighboring markets are so diverse.  We might also have to look at multiple years of data to see if Saratoga spiked while LG slumped to explain the difference. (more…)

How is the Williams Elementary School area of San Jose’s Almaden Valley 95120 doing in terms of the real estate market? Today we’ll look at the Williams area as compared to Almaden as a whole to see. First, the basic realty trends and stats for this nice section of Silicon Valley side by side for this year only (I pulled and crunched all of this data from MLSListings.com myself tonight, “deemed reliable but not guaranteed”):

1. Comparison of the average price per square foot for all of Almaden (including the Williams area) with just the Williams area of 95120:

While there is some fluctuation from one status to the next, at the end of the day there’s one number that matters the most, and that’s what actually sold and closed.  In the Williams area, homes have sold at an average of $418 per square foot while in Almaden generally (including this area), the price is $399 per square foot – about 5% less. This is tremendously important to understand if you are trying to purchase a home in the Williams area – homes there do, in fact, sell for more than in most parts (perhaps all parts) of the Almaden Valley.

Next, the stats for just the Williams area followed by the stats for all of 95120.
(more…)

What should you look for when buying a luxury home in Silicon Valley? Whether it’s a move-up purchase or a first home, there are a few tips which will be helpful for you to know going into it that will make the whole home buying experience smoother and easier.  We’ll hit on 3 areas: first geography & construction, second hyper local factors that impact market value, and finally qualities or features of the property or house itself.

It’s hard to assign an exact price tag on what constitutes an estate or luxury property, but in and near Silicon Valley, in most regions it’s the $2,000,000 and up price point (it will be less in Morgan Hill, Coyote and Gilroy – and likely more in Hillsborough).

1. Geography and Bay Area Construction: it’s different here!

The first and most important thing to understand is that real estate and housing construction vary from one region of the country (or the world) to the next.  This is true for all types of homes, actually, but perhaps more obvious in the priciest homes. Luxury real estate in Silicon Valley is a little different from similarly expensive homes in other parts of the country due to our climate, soil conditions, and natural hazards, such as earthquakes. What seems mandatory for a high end home (and might be ideal to have elsewhere) could be a problem here, so it’s helpful to literally understand the lay of the land before you get too far along the home buying path. A couple of quick examples:

• A fabulous home in Boston or anywhere in New England may be built of brick.
• Here, a brick house is seldom seen because of earthquakes – we need our houses to move and bricks are not usually too good at that!

I mention these two upfront because well intentioned friends and relatives may want to stress the importance of this or that in a property – and it may simply not apply here. (Please see article: Qualify The Advice You’ll Accept When Buying or Selling a Home in Silicon Valley)  If you are non-native to the San Francisco Bay Area, you may have assumptions about construction or architecture that may not work here. Please just be aware of that possibility.

2. Understand the importance of hyper local factors on the market value of a property

Schools can be a main driver for home values in the luxury market as all other segments.  Home buyers may not know that the town or city boundaries are usually irrelevant to school district boundaries. Here are a few examples:

• In Saratoga  there are 3 high school districts and 4 elementary school districts.  Before buying anywhere in Saratoga, then, you’ll want to know which district is which and where you’re buying.  If you want to utilize private schools, you may be delighted to find that you can buy more house for your money in one area of this lovely city than another.  Or you may want one school area over another for any number of reasons.
• In Los Gatos there are 2 high school districts and 3 elementary school districts.
• In the Almaden Valley area of San Jose, there are 3 high school districts and 3 elementary school districts

Often the lesser public school districts will have a lower lid on pricing than the very top districts or schools, so it’s important, when analyzing the pricing of an estate home, to factor in the weight of the school. (more…)

Malibu Grill in San Jose - menu

Malibu Grill is a Silicon Valley sports bar and hamburger place (and more, of course – baby back ribs, chicken, pizza, pasta) with the dual themes of surfing and all things athletic.  Jim and I occasionally pop over there for lunch or dinner as it’s just a few blocks from our neighborhood, Belwood of Los Gatos and we like the food, service, ambiance and prices.  Today we did again and happened to be there for Monday Madness Hamburgers, which save patrons a couple of bucks. That’s always nice!

A casual but friendly and comfortable restaurant, the Malibu Grill features a broad array of tasty burgers, sandwiches, and other items from the grill. It’s not all fried or carby food, though.  Today I ordered the Malibu Burger (basically a cheeseburger) with a side green salad rather than the fries (for $1 more or I could have had cole slaw, potato salad or fries at no extra cost). (more…)