Palo Alto neighborhoods, one by one Palo Alto is not one market.
What a buyer will pay for, and what they will quietly discount, changes within a few blocks. These pages are about selling here, not about moving here.
446 homes sold across 13 Palo Alto neighborhoods in the last year. Pick one to see every sale in it.
Palo Alto Hills
What the year actually says
Every figure below is measured against the price each home first asked, not the price it had been reduced to. That is the difference between a market that looks generous and one you can price against.
The line sits at $7M
Everything below $7M behaves the same way, whatever the price. Above it, the market inverts.
| First asked | Sales | Against first ask | Reached it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under $3M | 127 | +7.6% | 81% |
| $3M – $4.5M | 169 | +5.8% | 76% |
| $4.5M – $7M | 95 | +5.7% | 73% |
| Over $7M | 46 | −3.4% | 35% |
Below $7M a seller can expect the market to find the price. Above it, the market does not correct upward — the first number has to be right.
Which neighborhoods get bid up
Median sale against the first asking price. City-wide: +5.5%.
What a home costs, by neighborhood
Median closed price, with the median price per square foot beside it.
One story or two
Two-story homes carry a higher price and a larger footprint — but they are bid up less, which is the $7M line showing through.
Single story265 sales
- Median price
- $3.60M
- House
- 1,660 sq ft
- Lot
- 6,969 sq ft
- Typically built
- 1951
- Against first ask
- +6.8%
Two story141 sales
- Median price
- $5.35M
- House
- 2,805 sq ft
- Lot
- 7,500 sq ft
- Typically built
- 1964
- Against first ask
- +2.8%
Neighborhood by neighborhood
Every one of them has its own record.
The city median is a starting point and not much more. What a house does here depends on which four blocks it is on. Each of these has its own history, its own architects, its own map and its own answer on how long things take — and two of them turn out not to be neighbourhoods at all.
- South Palo Alto Not a neighborhood — a bucket. Once Midtown, Ventura, Green Gables, Green Acres and Barron Park are given their own MLS areas, everything else south of Oregon Expressway falls in here. What is actually inside it is the densest concentration of Joseph Eichler’s work anywhere. 105 sales in the last year
- Midtown Seven Eichler tracts, a Mexican land-grant hacienda site, and the expressway vote that split the city and created its politics. 50 sales in the last year
- Green Gables One of the first two Eichler neighbourhoods in the country on the National Register — and the tract where Eichler first hired real architects. 44 sales in the last year
- Old Palo Alto Never part of Stanford’s town — this was the Seale family’s cattle ranch, auctioned in 1904 and annexed in 1917, which is why the lots are deeper and the houses are a generation later. 40 sales in the last year
- Barron Park It was county land, not Palo Alto, until November 1975 — and it still looks it: no sidewalks on most streets, and a donkey pasture at the center of it. 39 sales in the last year
- Community Center The only Palo Alto neighborhood whose identity comes from civic buildings rather than a subdivision plan — a Birge Clark campus of theatre, library, museum and park, with a late Eichler pocket dropped into the same grid. 34 sales in the last year
- Crescent Park A designed subdivision rather than a grid filled in house by house — curving streets laid to the creek, half-acre lots, and a price floor written into the 1924 deeds. 30 sales in the last year
- College The one Palo Alto neighborhood that beat Leland Stanford to the name "Palo Alto" — and lost it in a settlement for $1,000. 28 sales in the last year
- Professorville The only Palo Alto neighborhood that is both a National Register district and a locally regulated one — and the houses were commissioned by named Stanford professors from architects they knew. 19 sales in the last year
- Downtown Palo Alto The original 1889 town — and the only residential area in the city where a street-parking permit is part of what you are buying. 18 sales in the last year
- Palo Alto Hills Most of it is zoned Open Space with a ten-acre minimum lot — and building a single house needs a City Council vote. 16 sales in the last year
- Green Acres Two neighborhood units rather than one, on a Mexican land grant bought by a Californiana businesswoman — and the one Palo Alto neighborhood whose recent history was settled at the ballot box. 12 sales in the last year
- Ventura The original Mayfield townsite and Palo Alto’s industrial edge — and the one neighborhood the city’s own consultants found had essentially no historic fabric, which is itself unusual here. 10 sales in the last year