Located on a quiet, tree lined street in the St. Francis Woods neighborhood of Willow Glen, San Jose, a stunningly remodeled and spacious home at 1548 Santa Inez Drive is a dream home in a fabulous neighborhood.

Offered for sale at $875,000 – Approximately 2028 square feet on a comfortable 8250 SF lot (per county records), this lovely 3 bedroom, 2.5 remodeled bath home has truly spacious living areas, a kitchen that will knock your socks off and a backyard perfect for entertaining. Please enjoy the virtual tour, below, then get all the details next.

Highlights of this Willow Glen home for sale include:

• 3 bedrooms with lovely crown moulding & large, classic base
• 2.5 elegantly remodeled bathrooms
• High-end, remodeled kitchenfeaturing slab granite counter tops and complimentary tile back splash with granite accent pieces
  • Stainless steel sink and appliances
    • GE Profile set of ovens (2 plus warming drawer)
    • Miele 5 burner gas range
    • Bosch dishwasher
    • GE Profile microwave
  • Extra high ceiling with a canopy of recessed lights
  • Tasteful and unique two tone cabinets – wood on bottom, black on top pieces with under-cabinet lighting installed, pullouts and “lazy Susan” too
  • Loads of storage & counter space plus a pantry
  • Floor made of large tiles, theme carried from entry hall into half bath, laundry area and pantry too
• Separate Living, Dining and Family Rooms 
  • Large Living Room with cathedral ceiling and fireplace offers direct access to back yard through inviting French doors
  • Spacious Dining Room includes hardwood floors, a fireplace, and French doors
  • Big Family Room with hardwood flooring, fireplace, and French doors to back patio and pool
• Laundry Room off kitchen & garage provides attic access through pull down staircase/ladder
• Large pool and spa in private back yard
• Attached two car garage
• Newer stamped concrete driveway
• Whole house air conditioning
• Dual pane windows
• Inspections done!  Regular sale!
• 2028 SF of living space & 8250 lot size per county
• Competitively priced at $875,000

This beauty of a home will steal your heart – especially the kitchen!

Fabulous location: St. Francis Woods neighborhood of Willow Glen, San Jose

The location is awesome, too.  The community-oriented St. Francis Woods neighborhood is located close to the intersection of Meridian and Hamilton, just off Blackford (in the area of Willow Glen served by the Campbell Union School District). While not quite an “urban neighborhood“, it is easy to walk to a few shops, including a pizza parlor, from there.  It’s easy to get to downtown Willow Glen, downtown Campbell, The Pruneyard or to hop on the 880/17 freeway or 280.  (It’s far enough to be quiet, though!)

Seeing the property at 1548 Santa Inez Drive, San Jose (Willow Glen)

Showings are a little restricted during weekdays but extremely easy on weekends.  Easiest of all – please plan to stop by the open house this Saturday July 30 & 31, between 2pm and 4pm to have a look.

1548 Santa Inez Drive
San Jose (Willow Glen), CA 95125

Cross streets are Blackford and Meridian

Homes as beautifully remodeled as this one seldom can be found in Willow Glen at this price point and there is high demand for a turnkey home in the Willow Glen real estate market so they sell fairly fast – don’t wait!

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How is the real estate market in the Willow Glen area of San Jose?  There are multiple ways of viewing it – via price point, school district, proximity to “downtown Willow Glen”, by numbers or percentages of distressed sales (sale type), and many more criteria.  Today we’ll look at the broad market numbers for the MLS “area 10″ (all of Willow Glen) and at times just the zip code for San Jose 95125, which covers the majority of the Willow Glen area.  This post will only cover houses or “single family homes”, not condominiums or townhomes.

I ran the months of inventory for homes in Willow Glen (our MLS area 10) by sale type.  Here’s what I found – most of the market appears to have about 4.95 months of inventory, with short sales being considerably longer.  (This may have had different results had I isolated certain school areas or price points – this is a “sweeping view” of the area only.) The National Association of Realtors says that less than 6 months is a sellers market, but for our area, this is fairly “cool” and most sellers would not find the market to be all that much in their favor. (Six months is supposed to be a balanced market.)

It is unusual for there to be so little variation in the MOI, so I double checked but this appears correct. Often bank owned homes or REOs fly off the market.  Odd that it’s not happening here, too.

Next, a selection of statistics and trends in the numbers from my REReport for Willow Glen (click on link for more info) – prices here reflect sold prices (median and average), not list prices:

Prices appear down from the prior month but up from a year ago.  That’s good news for Willow Glen home owners, who hope that the worst is now behind us.  Days on market are better than the previous month (but worse than a year ago) and inventory is up from last month but almost the same – just a little less – than a year ago.  It’s a mixed bag.

The next batch of info comes via my MLS, which I pulled together using a new tool, the Realtors Property Resource.  What I like about this set is that it includes distressed properties (banked owned homes or REOs as well as short sales and pre-foreclosures).

If the lack of new notices of default continues, we’ll see a lot of improvement in the Willow Glen market.

Next let’s look at the data provided by Altos Research (which uses list prices rather than sales prices). This is helpful as it views the listing activity by price quartile. That is, you can see that “the market” for the top tier or luxury homes in Willow Glen is behaving a bit differently from entry level houses in the same general area.

First, the median list price for San Jose 95125 (which covers about 90% or more of Willow Glen), going back as far as 2005:

It looks rather dismal, taken historically, until you pause to note the recent and very welcome uptick.

Next, the same data but broken down by price quartile - I think it is very interesting that the top tier of pricing there is at almost the same point as it was at the beginning of this time period. That certainly isn’t true for the other groups!

Right now the three lower price ranges seem to be moving up while the luxury home prices are moving the opposite direction.

Same data but just the last one year – not so dramatic:

So how’s the market? If your house or the one you want to purchase is a short sale in the highest pricing strata, the market is unduly soft. If your home is a regular sale in a lower price point, it may be completely different.

When I work with sellers and buyers on “their” market, I run the numbers every which way, but tailored to the home they own or wish to own – the schools, the price point, the sale type, how many distressed homes are nearby etc. The market is not one monolithic creature, but instead is a patchwork of many micro markets.

For information on your micro-market, please contact me! Should we decide to work together in buying or selling your home, I will provide you current and pinpointed market information.

Sometimes the list price on a Silicon Valley home for sale isn’t at all what the listing agent or the seller is expecting in terms of a sales price.

Sometimes it’s closer to a lost leader – that is, it’s really only intended to get home buyers into the door. Lots of them. The idea is to create excitement, and hopefully a feeding frenzy with multiple offers.

Other times, of course, a house or condo in the San Jose area may be an overpriced listing. In those cases, it’s more like a “fishing expedition”. More like, “let’s see if anyone bites”. There are always a percentage of these on the market. When you see homes listed for 60, 90 or more days on the valley floor, most often the culprit is an inappropriately high price – and most buyers aren’t biting at that bait.

Right now, it’s a mixed market in Santa Clara County real estate. If you find a home you like, the next question is this: what’s it worth? And finally, what’s it worth to you? Many times, the best advice is to ignore the list price, if it’s a new home, and just do your homework on what the current competition is and what’s been selling.

You may find that the home you love is priced high, on the mark, a little low, or crazy low.

While it’s helpful to know what the average ratio is between list prices and sales price, that information can never substitute for market knowledge.  The most powerful figure to understand is the absorption rate or months of inventory (or days or weeks of inventory).  Six months of inventory is considered a balanced market.  The smaller the months of inventory is, the quicker the pace of the market, and the bigger a frenzy there is over good inventory. 

The other day I did a post on the micro markets of the Willow Glen real estate market and I specifically called out the absorption rate in varioius price points and school districts within the Willow Glen area of San Jose.  I have one client couple in Willow Glen who are thinking of selling their home.  In their case, they’re in The Willows area.  Most of those homes are worth more than the “jumbo conforming” rate of about $729,000, which puts it higher than where most of the buyer activity is happening right now.  Absorption rates for that part of WG, with San Jose Schools, is about 3 1/2 months. Not bad – it’s well under the 6 month marker for it turning to a “buyer’s market”.  But homes priced between $500,000 and $600,000 which have Campbell/Cambrian schools are selling about 3 times faster! The absorption rate for that segment of WG is only about 1 month.

When deciding how to price your home to sell or the offer price to make on a home bid, it is imperative to understand the market nuances.  Your real estate agent can run you the comps, and in fact can download them to a spread sheet so you can tweak the numbers by sale type and other factors.  If prices are rising or falling, you must factor that in, too.  Homes all getting 10 offers and each price selling higher than the last? You may want to consider jumping ahead in the trajectory.  Same if you’re selling and prices in your part of the market are falling.  Prices going down 10k per month? Then put your price under that limit to get your home sold.

There are no “easy answers” on pricing.  To pinpoint what it takes to buy or sell a home in Silicon Valley today, there’s no substitute for market knowledge, which means finding out how many offers homes are getting and if possible, the sales price, and for simply doing the math.  If prices are moving against you, it will cost you dearly to misjudge the market, so it is well worth the effort to get it right – hopefully the first time.