A Taste of San Mateo Real Estate

After I graduated from college, I got a job as a software engineer paying around $60,000 per year. I thought that was a fairly good offer, except, I ended up living in San Mateo County, where a $63,000 per year salary is considered low income. I must say, I do enjoy living here even though it is very expensive. For the past two years I shared a three bedroom condo with two other women and paid around $700 a month in rent. In other parts of the country, I am sure you can rent entire houses with that much money, but here it’s pretty much impossible to rent anything more than a studio or single room for that price. My parents have always encouraged me to buy a place of my own, because they do believe that renting is throwing away money. Now that I am forming a new household with my fiance, his parents also suggested that we should buy a place, and they even generously offered to help us with the downpayment.So I did some research on buying a house, and found some excellent housing bubble blogs, and some truly horrifying houses. I blogrolled Irvine Housing Bubble and Dr. Housing Bubble because I love their posts, but the scary homes they feature in the OC and the “Inland empire” really can not compare to the barf-inducing shacks and McMansions in San Mateo county. Here’s somewhat of a faceoff, SoCal housing bubble against NorCal housing bubble:

SoCal Entry #1 – Real Homes of Genius 07/24 by Dr. Housing Bubble
SoCal Home quick stats: A small 2 bedroom and 1 bath home measuring 816 sqft, age unknown, listing for $400,000, short sale, last sale price $500,000 on 8/31/2006. For all the rest of the gory details click on the link.

San Mateo Contender #1– 2164 Poplar Ave, East Palo Alto, San Mateo County

This house that looks like a matchbox supported by matchsticks is probably the only thing I can afford in this county. When you look at the price per square foot on this home, I might as well just pack up and move to Manhattan. For those of you unfamiliar with the cities in San Mateo County, let me give you an SAT style analogy Southern Californians can instantly understand: Compton: Los Angeles = East Palo Alto : San Mateo. The last sale price on this home was $350,000 on 04/19/2006. That means the seller stands to gain more than $80000 in a little more than a year. This is a gain of 22% in 16 months if it manages to sell. I send the future buyer my condolences. As a direct comparison to the Real Homes of Genius, this East Palo Alto beauty is much older, and costs approximately twice per sqft. It also makes potential buyers feel like San Mateo real estate is really not deflating.

Now onto the next round:

SoCal Entry #2 – Irvine Housing Blog’s latest on The English Garden

Lately IrvineRenter has been blogging about homes that are dropping in price back to the prices of yesteryears. So this home he featured is not a trainwreck at all. So the question is, are there any decent San Mateo homes in my favorite neighborhood that’s rolling back prices?

San Mateo Contender #2 — 1224 HOWARD AVE, San Carlos, CA 94070

My search parameters on Redfin was: 1000-1250 sqft, 2 bedroom+ single family home located from Ralston in Belmont to Woodside Rd. in Redwood City west of El Camino Real. The search yielded 39 results, and the average price square foot is a whopping $710! The San Carlos home featured here is the closest thing to a “rollback”. The last sale price was $760,000 in February of 2006, and the current listing price is $779,900. Needless to say, I cannot afford a home like this. It really makes me wonder who is buying all of these homes since the median household income for San Mateo is around $65000. I am sincerely hoping that the rollbacks in Southern California and the surrounding counties will move into San Mateo, so people can buy their only little secret hideouts again. For now, my fubby and I are renting a great condo in Redwood City for less than half the mortgage required to buy a similar unit.

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