Mountain View is a city filled with wonderful parks, a dynamic downtown, great
entertainment resources and a diverse well-educated population. Nearly 65% of the city’s 70,000+ residents
hold a college degree and the average income is close to $90,000. I personally am bullish on Mountain View real
estate and own 4 investment properties in this fine city. These 4 properties have been wonderful
investments as growing employers like Google, Veritas, Verisign, LinkedIn, Fenwick and West, LLP, and the Mountain View
Medical Center have resulted in a wave of new professionals looking for homes
close to work.
Mountain View History
Mountain
View is a city in a state of evolution.
The city, which gets its name from its views of the Santa Cruz
Mountains, had humble roots.
Incorporated in 1902, Mountain View was primarily a stage coach stop on
the route between San Francisco and San Jose with a small selection of services
available to the weary travelers that came through. Even as late as the 1960’s the city was
primarily an agricultural center filled with crop land and orchards. The success of nearby Stanford University as
well as the emergence of the technology industry in the 1970s quickly changed
the character of the City drawing professionals to the area that liked the
city’s central location. As demand for
housing increased farm land was transformed into developments of
family-friendly California style homes.
Even today many residents have fruit trees in their yards that once
yielded crops for sale.
Today,
Mountain View neighborhoods are as varied as the housing types, with 30 percent
single-family, 11 percent townhouses, 55 percent multifamily and 4 percent
mobile homes. Nearly 42 percent are owner-occupied. Mountain View’s diversified population enjoys
superb recreation and arts facilities, including Shoreline Park and the
Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.
If you are comfortable with Mountain View currently you will certainly
enjoy it’s continued gentrification and improvement as Google and other high
tech power houses continue to grow and their employees happily call Mountain
View home.
Mountain View Appreciation
Silicon Valley, and Mountain View in particular, benefit from there being a
great demand to live here coupled with a very low supply of homes for
sale. Generally, out of the over 10,000
homes in Mountain View there will usually be between 40 and 90 single family
homes for sale at any one time. The
desirability of living in Mountain View coupled with the higher incomes created
by local jobs has resulted in Mountain View enjoying double digit appreciation
in single family homes over the last nine years (obviously with a lot of
variability over those years). I predict
future appreciation in the 4% to 6% range for Mountain View as this area
continues to become more exclusive.
While I give a neighborhood by neighborhood analysis of appreciation on the
following pages, there are two general comments that apply to all
neighborhoods: Homes that are more
uniformly comprised of single family homes will appreciate faster than mixed
zoning neighborhoods and the closer a home is to Los Altos or Palo Alto, the
faster the home will appreciate.