Who has sold houses on Embarcadero, 101, Middlefield, Alma, University Avenue and Oregon Expressway?

Maggie Ma has, and nearly her whole sold list is that kind of house. 1560 University Avenue on one of the busiest residential stretches in town. 1280 Lincoln Avenue at the intersection of two busy roads. 2280 and 2200 Saint Francis Drive close to Highway 101. 154 Coleridge Avenue within earshot of the train, after two other agents had tried. 1690 Edgewood Drive, which five agents had already taken on over about four years. Every one of those closed, and most closed above the price they first asked.

The record

Each of these is a recorded Palo Alto transaction with its own page, its own MLS number and its own close price.

Home	What it was up against, in her own words	Closed
1560 University Avenue	Heavy traffic, original windows, an aging roof	$5,825,000
154 Coleridge Avenue	The train is close enough to hear, and two agents had already tried	$7,940,000
1690 Edgewood Drive	Five agents had already tried, over roughly four years	$5,110,000
2280 Saint Francis Drive	Close to the freeway, and every buyer sees that on the map first	$6,300,000
1280 Lincoln Avenue	The house sits at the intersection of two busy roads	$5,050,000

The full sold record is here, with what was done to each house and what it closed at. Two others are worth a look alongside these: 2200 Saint Francis Drive, on the same Green Gables street as 2280, which closed $122,000 above asking in thirteen days; and 767 Loma Verde Avenue, a townhouse that ran six weeks on the market and still closed above the price it first asked.

Why these are the listings she gets

A good house on a quiet Palo Alto street largely sells itself. The market does the work and an agent adds very little to the number.

The houses that do not sell themselves are the ones where the work shows up in the price — and they are the ones an agent has to earn rather than inherit. Maggie’s book is almost entirely the second kind, because that is how she built it.

The clearest evidence of the pattern came from outside. A Palo Alto agent referred a listing to her, having noticed that Maggie’s listings are all on main streets. The market arrived at that conclusion on its own, before this site ever said it out loud.

What the town does, for comparison

Across 2,292 Palo Alto single-family sales recorded between 2021 and 2026, the median home closed at 103.4% of its original asking price in nine days, and 62% closed above the price they first asked.

Homes fronting a through road closed at a median 102.7% in eleven days.

Source: Maggie’s analysis of 2,292 Palo Alto single-family sales, MLSListings, 2021–2026.

Those are the medians the houses above were working against. What each of them actually did is on its own page, with the MLS number, so the arithmetic can be checked.

If the delta is biggest where it is hardest

The worry this raises is reasonable and worth answering directly: does an agent whose record is built on difficult houses only want difficult houses?

The logic runs the other way. If the gap between a good result and an average one is widest on the house with the most in its way, then on an easier house the same work has more room rather than less. The skill does not shrink when the problem does.

Talk it through

Every showing, every offer, every call — Maggie herself, in English or Mandarin. There is no charge for the first conversation and nothing has to be decided in it.

The market figures in this section come from Maggie’s own analysis of 2,292 Palo Alto single-family sales recorded in MLSListings between 2021 and 2026. They are medians across many homes and describe what has already happened, not what will happen to one address. Where a street carries fewer than ten recorded sales it is named as a small sample and no rate is given for it. No individual home’s asking price or days on market is published here.