Poll: What Was the Most Expensive Neighborhood in San Carlos in 2010?
January 5, 2011
Another Quiz.
A few weeks ago, I created a poll where I asked you to guess which neighborhood in San Carlos sold the quickest on average in 2010. The result of that poll was certainly surprising to me — I know that I guessed incorrectly! So let's take another stab at San Carlos real estate trivia in 2010. This time, what do you think the most expensive neighborhood in San Carlos was in 2010?
This is a little bit tricky, because comparing homes in different neighborhoods in San Carlos is like comparing an apple to an orange. The homes down in the flats are generally smaller and older than the homes in the hills. So rather than compare the average sales price of the different neighborhoods, we will use the average price-per-square-foot as our metric. That's simply the ratio of the sales price to the square footage of the house, and it helps neutralize the difference in the sizes of the homes.
The Poll.
So what's your guess? Is it Alder Manor, Beverly Terrace, Clearfield Park, Cordes, El Sereno Corte (aka White Oaks), or Howard Park? If you need a map of these different regions, just click here: San Carlos Neighborhood Map. Look in the sidebar on the right side of the site for the poll, and register your guess! I'll publish the correct answer next week. Good luck!
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Chuck –
Price per square foot does not neutralize the difference in the sizes of the homes. If you were to plot the price per square foot ($/sf) versus square footage (sf), you would see an almost linear relationship between $/sf and sf in any given neighborhood.
If you really wanted to compare neighborhoods, you would have to make such a plot for each neighborhood and see how they stack up that way. With your engineering background, you should be up for such a task, right?
Neutralize was probably not the word I was looking for — “normalize” is the mathematical equivalent of dividing out the square footage. Regardless of what it is called, it’s a quick way to be able to compare the relative value between uncommon neighborhoods.
You are correct in that if you take the analysis one step further and plot $/sq foot as a function of square footage, you will see a basic, repeating trend for each neighborhood: Generally, smaller homes have a higher $/sq foot, while the $/sq foot drops for larger homes. This is largely because in smaller homes, there is less “lower value” square footage like living rooms, family rooms, and large bedrooms. Also, the dirt value of the property is a much bigger factor in smaller homes than larger ones.
So when one plots $/sq foot versus square footage (which I did) the result is a very jagged line that trends downward as the square footage increases — same basic result for all neighborhoods. From the results I saw, I wouldn’t take the leap to say that it’s a linear relationship, but it is predictable.