Palo Alto · Crescent Park What has sold in Crescent Park.
Every single-family sale recorded in Crescent Park over the last twelve months — where each one is, what it fetched, and how it did against the price it first asked.
Crescent Park · Palo Alto
What this neighborhood actually did.
Closed sales of single-family homes in Crescent Park, Palo Alto, from September 2, 2025 to September 25, 2026. Source: MLSListings. Each sale is listed with the firm that represented the seller. Information deemed reliable but not guaranteed. Figures are medians rather than averages — one very large sale should not move a neighborhood’s number. 446 sales were recorded in this period; 30 of them carried coordinates and are drawn here. Base map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.
What this place is
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.
The land was a eucalyptus farm. Dr William Newell bought it in 1864 and planted some of the first Australian eucalyptus in the United States; the trees came before the streets by sixty years.
When the subdivision was laid out in 1924 it was planned, not platted. The streets curve because they trace San Francisquito Creek, which is where the name comes from — a deliberate curvilinear plan at a moment when the rest of Palo Alto was a grid. The deeds set a minimum house cost of $10,000, roughly one and a half times what an entire average American house cost that year, on lots averaging half an acre.
The result is a neighborhood of individually architected houses on large lots, Spanish Colonial and English manor among them, on streets that still do not run straight.
The specifics
- The land was bought in 1864 by Dr William Newell, who planted some of the first Australian eucalyptus trees in the United States on it.
- Annexed to Palo Alto in 1920; the planned subdivision debuted in 1924, with a further 31 acres along San Francisquito Creek added in 1928.
- The 1924 deeds required a minimum house cost of $10,000, set mandatory setbacks, averaged lots at half an acre and banned livestock and poultry. They also carried restrictions on who could live there which have long been illegal and void.
- The Dunker House at 420 Maple (Birge Clark, 1926) was listed on the National Register on February 19, 1982 — one of the earliest Spanish Colonial houses in Palo Alto.Palo Alto Stanford Heritage
- Charles K. Sumner, who trained at Columbia and worked for McKim, Mead & White before moving to Palo Alto in 1916, built more than fifty houses here and nearby between 1916 and 1941 — including an English manor on the 800 block of Hamilton and a Tudor at 548 E. Crescent Drive in 1928.
- That Hamilton Avenue manor is where Palo Alto’s drink ban ended. Its owner from 1942, a lawyer and state assemblyman, brought the final suit against the 1888 deed restrictions barring alcohol within a mile and a half of Stanford. A court ruled for him in December 1970, and he drank the first legal cocktail downtown in May 1971 — 82 years after the ban was written.The Almanac
Crescent Park in one paragraph
30 homes sold in Crescent Park over the last year, at a median of $5.89M — above the Palo Alto median of $4.01M. The typical one is a 2,900 sq ft two-story house from 1946 on an 8,999 sq ft lot, at $2,354 a square foot.
Against the price sellers first asked — not the price they had been reduced to — the median sale here finished +2.4%, and 69% of sellers got at least their asking price. That is weaker than Palo Alto as a whole, where the median is +5.5%. Here the first number has to be closer to right, because the market is less inclined to correct it upward.
In Crescent Park, the first two weeks are the sale
Every sale grouped by how long it took, against the price it first asked. Not against a reduced price — against the number it launched at.
Too few sales in Crescent Park’s outer bands to read this one on its own, so here is the wider market it sits in: homes that sell in the first week finish +10.4% against their opening price and 98% reach it; past sixty days the median is −11.7% and 3% reach it. Whatever is going to happen, happens early.
Every sale: what it fetched, and how it did
One dot per home. Across is the result against the price it first asked. Up is what it actually sold for. Red beat its asking price; charcoal did not.
The dashed lines are the two medians — $5.92M and +2.4%. A dot to the right of the upright line beat the price it opened at; a dot above the flat one sold for more than the typical home here. What the corners tell you is whether the top of Crescent Park behaves like the rest of it.
If this is your street
The map says what sold. It doesn’t say what yours would.
Two houses on the same Crescent Park block can be hundreds of dollars a square foot apart, and the difference is almost never the house — it is what was done to it before anyone saw it. Maggie will tell you which of those things is worth doing on yours, and which is not.