The Most Expensive Zip Codes – The Series You Hate, The Cities You Loathe
Welcome to Part 5 of the least popular series ever on burbed, ever. You’re welcome. Forbes thanks you too, since we’re making fun of their mistakes when they wrote an article on the 500 most expensive zips, and hired Altos Research to do their data crunching.
Here are the first four parts for you masochists who can’t get enough numbers, maps, and boring fascinating statistics.
- The 25 Most Expensive Zip Codes in the US – Atherton is #2!
- The Next 25 Zips that didn’t quite make it — Portola Valley at top of this one because it didn’t make the real list.
- The Bottom 50 of the 100 Most Expensive Zips — Helloooooo Los Altos!
- Loservilles: Zips 101-150 on the Most Expensive List — And not a single one near Facebook HQ.
Today we’re going to cover the zips ranked 151-200. But to reduce the complaining just a tiny bit, we’ll leave out anywhere that isn’t within reasonable commuting distance to the Googleplex. Actually if I left out everywhere more than 10 miles from Google we’d only have four cities today, which might not be such a bad thing.
#151 – 94306 Palo Alto
- Median Home Price: $1,270,424
- Median Price Change: 4%
- Average Days On Market: 67
- Inventory: 69 properties
- Median Household Income: $82,314
At least this time we’re going to start much closer to where the jobs are. This is a very important zip code. If you remember this article, 94306 is the only zip code that’s left in the Real Bay Area (RBA) anymore, if you define RBA as the place where prices don’t go down. So despite being the #2 zip in Palo Alto (94301 came in at #73 on the list), it’s #1 in the RBA. It’s also last in the RBA, because none of the other zips qualified at all.
The real reason 94306 went up while prices everywhere else collapsed is because it’s the cheap section of Palo Alto. This area, formerly the city of Mayfield, featured small homes on small lots which people now tear down and put in oversized mini-mansions that loom over the remaining bungalows. Unfortunately, real estate statistics are oblivious to such trends, such as someone paying money to remodel or replace a house. Instead you see crazy price increases and think the neighborhood is red-hot rather than full of sawdust and paint fumes. If the sale price stats subtracted out the money paid for construction, there’s a good chance 94306 would have dropped as much or even more than the other zips around it.
#160 – 94549 Lafayette
- Median Home Price: $1,225,110
- Median Price Change: -4%
- Average Days On Market: 88
- Inventory: 126 properties
- Median Household Income: $101,555
- Ignored Because: In the East Bay
#170 – 94941 Mill Valley
- Median Home Price: $1,185,211
- Median Price Change: NA
- Average Days On Market: 106
- Inventory: 197 properties
- Median Household Income: $91,283
- Ignored Because: Model for Hill Valley in Back to the Future
#171 – 94563 Orinda
- Median Home Price: $1,184,089
- Median Price Change: -5%
- Average Days On Market: 101
- Inventory: 101 properties
- Median Household Income: $119,832
- Ignored Because: In East Bay, even closer to Oakland than Lafayette
#173 – 94303 Palo Alto
- Median Home Price: $1,175,241
- Median Price Change: -5%
- Average Days On Market: 59
- Inventory: 34 properties
- Median Household Income: $64,256
It’s a pretty safe bet that the median home price hasn’t been contaminated by East Palo Alto (which shares this zip code), but take a look at that median household income. It’s about $20,000 less than 94306, which has a fairly similar set of residents (in the Palo Alto part of the zip, anyway).
While the zip shares with the Oaklandesque East Palo Alto (hey, at least it brought you IKEA), it also has some nice areas in midtown as well as the West Marine on San Antonio Road. (Remember, yachties spend like drunken sailors because they are drunken sailors.)
Since 94303 has just everything in the whole city that hugs US 101, that isn’t helping matters. Some of the lower-cost Eichlers in South Palo Alto that get torn down and replaced by monster houses are in 94303, too. Hope they put in triple-pane windows like they did at Gables End.
#175 – 94965 Sausalito
- Median Home Price: $1,173,479
- Median Price Change: -11%
- Average Days On Market: 149
- Inventory: 84 properties
- Median Household Income: $76,808
- Ignored Because: Has stupid song written about it
#179 – 94705 Berkeley
- Median Home Price: $1,152,174
- Median Price Change: -1%
- Average Days On Market: 70
- Inventory: 30 properties
- Median Household Income: $68,112
- Ignored Because: Shares zip code with Oakland, lousy state-funded college
#184 – 94025 Menlo Park
- Median Home Price: $1,134,946
- Median Price Change: -9%
- Average Days On Market: 88
- Inventory: 179 properties
- Median Household Income: $89,572
When you realize that this zip stretches from the foothills near I-280 all the way to the slums of Belle Haven, that median home price is rather impressive. Not every city the size of Menlo Park has to make due with a single zip code. Palo Alto has four distinct zips, and Redwood City has five.
And while a ranking of 184th most expensive zip code in the country is clearly not good enough for the RBA, perhaps Menlo Park could petition the
postal service to split the city into East and West postal zones, in hope of the western half aspiring to the RBA.
Nah, prices down 9%. Forget it.
#185 – 94062 Redwood City
- Median Home Price: $1,133,462
- Median Price Change: -5%
- Average Days On Market: 97
- Inventory: 111 properties
- Median Household Income: $96,677
Ha ha! What was I just talking about above? Redwood City is nowhere as high on the snootiness index as Menlo Park, and yet by having several zip codes, they managed to get one of them to qualify for the Forbes list. And this is the one zip that shares with Woodside, which is quite a bit higher in the rankings (#41).
Oh, speaking of Woodside, you’ll never guess what Forbes says their median household income is. That’s right. $96,677. Nice going, Forbes. That means the Woodside median should be higher and the Redwood city number lower, but you managed to miss yet another muck-up.
This part of Redwood City includes the Emerald Lake Hills area, which is a delightful mix of new construction and bizarre old places featuring old cars in the front yard. You know how some places in Atherton look like Greenwich, Connecticut? Well, Emerald Lake Hills looks like Appalachia where half the residents won the lottery.
#193 – 94515 Calistoga
- Median Home Price: $1,102,625
- Median Price Change: -17%
- Average Days On Market: 140
- Inventory: 67 properties
- Median Household Income: $44,320
- Why Ignored: Can’t take place named after bubble water seriously
#194 – 94610 Piedmont
- Median Home Price: $1,094,846
- Median Price Change: -51%
- Average Days On Market: 64
- Inventory: 7 properties
- Median Household Income: $49,066
- Why Ignored: Not only down 51%, but completely surrounded by Oakland. Completely. Rival zip 94611 is #74 on list. I also call BS on Forbes for that median household income. It’s probably mixed up with the part of OAKLAND this zip shares with. Oakland, it’s full of Oakland.
#199 – 95032 Los Gatos
- Median Home Price: $1,079,587
- Median Price Change: -1%
- Average Days On Market: 111
- Inventory: 183 properties
- Median Household Income: $93,118
It’s the home of Netflix! Woo-hoo!
The second-best zip in Los Gatos (95030 came in at #38), this zip features delightful estates in the foothills and higher, as well as ho-hum tract houses in the flats near freeways.
Now, take a look at that median home price, above. It’s barely over a million smackeroos, and we’ve almost hit the 200 mark. That means the next installment (if there is one) will feature houses in “expensive zip codes” that are under a million dollars dollars for a median price.
Think about that for a moment. Where we live is so Special that we think of houses under a million dollars as not particularly worth commenting on. At least most of the zips we’ve shown so far are above the average price for a house in this area. But as we work our way down that list of 500 zips, we’re going to start to see some very ordinary places that are still more expensive than 44,000 other zip codes in the entire country.
Coming Soon: burbed guest editor forcibly retired for not stopping worst series ever, assailed by mob with pitchforks and torches. Plus, Part 716 of Bing Maps Galore!
