The weather’s great and there’s plenty to do to celebrate Halloween in and near Silicon Valley! Here are a few events you might consider in our Santa Clara County area:

And if you like “real” ghost stories, please stop by my Haunted Real Estate blog.

Happy Halloween!
Mary

Yesterday some clients of mine asked me about seniors selling their home and purchasing another residence while keeping the older, lower property tax rate. I did a little digging and thought I’d share what I found.

There are actually two propositions involved.  Prop 60 applies to moves within Santa Clara County, and Prop 90 relates to moves between counties which are participating in this benefit to seniors (only these few, as of the date of this posting: Alameda, Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Ventura).

Some of the basics:

• Homeowners 55 and older at the time of sale of the original property.
• Homeowner must be on record both for the home that’s sold and the replacement property.
• The replacement residence must be equal to or lesser in value than the original residence.
• There are special rules for multi-family (duplex, triplex, fourplex) properties and for mobile homes.

In the most typical scenario, a senior homeowner would sell a house (or townhome or condo) and “downsize” to another, less expensive, smaller house or condo.  If the homeowner had been in the first property for a very long time, then the low tax rate would be hard to give up, but Props 60 and 90 enable that homeowner to go to another, less expensive home and carry the old tax rate along – one time, and either in the home county or in one of the participating counties. 

I have known seniors to sell a house in Los Gatos, Saratoga or San Jose and move to The Villages or to gated senior communities out of the area but closer to their grown kids and make use of these two propositions.

For more information and to get all the details, please click on the links above.

The other day I was hunting for local maps of Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley) dating back 100 years or so, and although I didn’t find exactly what I wanted, I did find a treasure trove that I hadn’t expected to find at all.

Here please find a tiny snippet of a USGS Map from the late 1890s (actually part of the Palo Alto Map). According to my husband, who has a hobby of viewing and collecting maps, each “dot” on this image represents a house. If that is the case, you can see how sparcely populated Saratoga and Cupertino were at this time.

And what is that Azule Springs? Was it another hot springs type resort, like Saratoga Springs? A map like this raises a lot of questions!

If you love – or at least enjoy – history, I invite you to visit the USGS website and look at the historic maps there. One section includes Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino and the coastal areas such as Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay. Another section of the map includes Los Gatos, Monte Sereno, Campbell, Almaden, Cambrian Park, Santa Clara and many parts of San Jose. 

It’s fun to see where things “used to be” and how they “used to be called”. Take a few minutes and enjoy!

There’s a lot for those of us in Silicon Valley to be feeling stressed out about lately. Between the stock market’s wild ride and sinking home values in Santa Clara County (and around the country), it’s a little nerve-wracking. These times are especially upsetting if you’re a senior and plan to retire soon. For years, people looked at their homes with the fond sense of “this is my retirement fund” – or at least a good part of it. Some of that value is now gone.

It’s also stressful for those of us who’ve put money into retirement funds or college savings plans and need it soon. Here in California, the 529 College Savings Plan is an “index fund”. That means it’s a combination of stocks, mutual funds, and bonds. In my house, we have one kid who’s a freshman in college and one who’s a senior in high school, and we’re seeing the 529 Plan shrink right when we need it.

The stock market, the financial crisis and the housing market are bigger than all of us. We are on the verge of a recession, if not already in one now. There’s a lot that’s beyond our control. But what CAN we do to maximize the current situation?

I cannot say what to do about the stock market, though my hunch is that when people advise “buy low”, they are talking about today. I can say something about the housing market in the San Jose area, though, because I’ve got experience with it, both professionally and personally. There are opportunities in this market for those who are able to act on them.

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Silicon Valley, which consists of San Jose in large part, is sprawling city. We have lousy public transportation (though it’s getting better) and one of the unfortunate hallmarks of San Jose or Santa Clara County as a whole is that you really need a car to get around here.

Don’t tell Walkscore. They just ranked a few San Jose neighborhoods on the “most walkable” list in the country. Walk – in San Jose? OK, we do have 300 sunny days a year and only about 20″ of rain per year, so walking is pleasant. But where can you really live and walk and not use a car?
Walkscore put San Jose’s Buena Vista, Rosegarden, and Burbank neighborhoods at #17 of the top 40 US cities for walkability. No, I’m not kidding.

Does this surprise you? It does me, and I’m a valley native.

Walkable areas: I’d have said San Jose’s Willow Glen area, the original Cambrian Village area of Cambrian Park (lots of homes near lots of shops) as well as other Silicon Valley neighborhoods. There are several walkable areas in Los Gatos, Saratoga, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Los Altos, Santa Clara
(esp near the University of Santa Clara. There’s a lot of walk-to in downtown areas in San Jose such as Japantown and Nagelee Park, though in fairness they are needing a large grocery store there.