Good points Fearful. I do remember the marine layer when I lived in Del Mar and know that Cielo also gets clouds. Everything is relative. I have never been to Seattle on a sunny day and I have been there a lot. In the east, every day seemed cloudy, until I went to Seattle. In the Bay Area, every day seemed sunny, until I went to San Diego.
You are also correct that when you can afford more homes, decisions get tougher. Now I would not say I an afford 99% of RSF, more like 60% seems to be the case for me in my price range, but up here I don’t have that problem. There are 3 homes in my price range for sale that I would even remotely be interested and not one of them is any where as nice as the worst home out of the 34 homes we will have already viewed in 3 trips to SD by this Monday. All 34 were/are nice and 20 of them very nice with at least a half dozen dream homes to me.
If the worse one of them were up here, we would probably go, “wow, that is a dream house.” Your standards change. And the “dream” homes we saw down there just don’t exist up here (at least where we would look). The ones just below that would be $10 million plus homes here (at least where we woudl look).
That is simply because 6,000-8,000 sf homes are so rare on the Penninsula that they can sell for a serious premium. The lowest priced 6k sf home I saw in Los Altos Hills was a new developer home that was very poor quality and shoddy workmanship on 1 acre that was selling for $5 million, and that was after 3 price drops! I viewed it because the price seemd so dirt cheap for the square footage? It was a Mediteranian so easy to compare to RSF houses I saw. Not even close in quality and it was a big box rectangle and no pool and sparse landscaping AND right next to (I mean glued to) loud Highway 280 (just jump over the fence and get run over at 80mph).
There are very high quality built homes in LAH and the Bay Area of course, but not at that price range. The nicest one I saw in LAH in the Mediteranian style was well done, but not as nice as most I saw in RSF as to details. But it was much much higher quality that the 6k sf house above. It was 4,600sf and selling for $4.4 million, right at the top of my range.
