Palo Alto · Professorville What has sold in Professorville.
Every single-family sale recorded in Professorville over the last twelve months — where each one is, what it fetched, and how it did against the price it first asked.
Professorville · Palo Alto
What this neighborhood actually did.
Closed sales of single-family homes in Professorville, 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; 19 of them carried coordinates and are drawn here. Base map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.
What this place is
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.
Stanford leased its campus land rather than selling it. A professor who wanted to own the house he lived in had to build outside the university’s control, and in 1889 Timothy Hopkins subdivided the ground immediately east of campus for exactly that purpose. The National Register nomination puts it plainly: Professorville "was to be the home of the Stanford University faculty."
What that produced is unusual. These are not spec houses. They were individually commissioned over roughly forty years by people who knew architects personally — which is why one neighborhood holds a Maybeck, work by Stanford’s own resident architect, and a run of Dutch Colonials three blocks long on Kingsley. It reads as a catalogue of Bay Area domestic architecture from 1890 to 1930 because that is literally what it is.
It is also, incidentally, where Silicon Valley started. The garage at 367 Addison is eighteen feet by twelve.
The specifics
- Subdivided in 1889 by Timothy Hopkins for Leland Stanford, as housing for faculty who wanted to own rather than lease.National Register nomination
- Listed on the National Register on October 3, 1980, with about 105 contributing properties built between the 1890s and 1929. The city’s own district is larger — designated 1979 and expanded east in 1993 to roughly 200 properties.City of Palo Alto — Professorville design guidelines
- Bernard Maybeck designed the Kellogg House at 1061 Bryant in 1899. Arthur Bridgman Clark — a Stanford professor, and Birge Clark’s father — designed 356 Lincoln in 1896 for an engineering professor. Birge Clark himself built Kingsley Court, ten cottages, in 1940.Palo Alto Stanford Heritage
- Dutch Colonials dominate three consecutive blocks of Kingsley Avenue; brown shingle with gambrel roofs runs through the rest.
- 367 Addison Avenue — the HP garage — is California Registered Landmark No. 976 and was added to the National Register on April 20, 2007. The house was first occupied by Palo Alto’s first mayor.Palo Alto Stanford Heritage
- The Norris House at 1247 Cowper (Birge Clark, 1928) was built for Kathleen Norris, then among the highest-paid authors in the country. Clark’s notes record that the Norrises first tried simply to buy his Dunker house in Crescent Park, and that a billiard-room wing was cut to keep the cost under $100,000.Palo Alto Stanford Heritage
Professorville in one paragraph
19 homes sold in Professorville over the last year, at a median of $4.50M — above the Palo Alto median of $4.01M. The typical one is a 2,374 sq ft two-story house from 1920 on a 5,625 sq ft lot, at $2,103 a square foot.
Against the price sellers first asked — not the price they had been reduced to — the median sale here finished +3.5%, and 61% 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 Professorville, 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 Professorville’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 — $4.50M and +3.7%. 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 Professorville 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 Professorville 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.