2026 San Carlos Neighborhood Check-In: Cordes

Last week, I wrote a pair of articles that challenged readers to guess which was the most expensive neighborhood in San Carlos in 2025. Those articles generated several questions from readers about their particular neighborhoods, so I thought it would be useful to create a series of data-driven updates, or “check-ins”, about each of the six San Carlos neighborhoods. This is the first in a series of six posts…

Cordes

Cordes is the name for the portion of San Carlos that lies north of San Carlos Avenue and shares a border with the adjacent city of Belmont. This particular San Carlos neighborhood is mostly hilly and boasts some of the best views of the San Francisco Bay and the surrounding Bay Area, not only in San Carlos, but along the entire Peninsula.

Home buyers certainly don't choose Cordes if they are looking for a home on a large flat lot. While the lot sizes are larger than those in other neighborhoods in San Carlos, they are often very steep and are not as usable as an equivalent-sized flat lot, say, in White Oaks.

Aside from its spectacular views, Cordes is unique among its five other sibling San Carlos neighborhoods in that it's the only one that is entirely within the Carlmont High School boundary. Most of the remainder of San Carlos is either entirely within Sequoia High School or a mix of both. Consequently, those home buyers who absolutely must be in the Carlmont High School boundary will favor this neighborhood, as well as anywhere in Belmont or Redwood Shores.

The Numbers

To get a better feel for home prices and trends in Cordes, I did some data mining over the past five years and created a number of graphs below:

The first graph shows the number of single-family homes that have sold each year since 2021:

This chart roughly mirrors what happened over the past 5 years elsewhere in San Carlos and all along the Peninsula. 2020 and 2021 were banner years for home sales because home mortgage interest rates were at rock-bottom levels due to the pandemic. 2022 was the year that the Federal Reserve initiated their belated and aggressive policy of raising interest rates to combat inflation, and you can see very clearly the impact it had on the local real estate market.

Cordes has still not fully recovered from the post-pandemic hangover. That region normally averages about 50 sales per year, and it's been running below 40 since rates more than doubled.

The second chart is the average and median sales prices for these very same homes.

This is the kind of chart that should make Cordes homeowners very happy and leave homeowners a bit discouraged. Cordes easily notched the highest average and median sales price on record in 2025, as did other neighborhoods in San Carlos. Barring an unexpected drop in home prices in the second half, 2026 is on track to beat these numbers and set yet another record.

It's always a good checkpoint when discussing pricing to look at the average price-per-square-foot of those homes that sold. That data is below.

Although the average price per square foot was certainly on the high side for this neighborhood, it was not a record level – it was exceeded by 2022 and 2024. But the average and median prices were record levels. What does that mean?

I discussed this phenomenon in the post about the most expensive neighborhoods in San Carlos. When record-high prices are coupled with lower price-per-square-foot calculations, that points to one thing: The houses that sold were bigger.

Let's see if that holds true.

As the data predicted, the homes that sold in Cordes in 2025 were significantly larger on average than in previous years. This is another datapoint that will be mirrored across much of San Carlos since there are so many remodeling projects and new construction taking place right now.

Key Takeaways:

Here are the key things to remember about the Cordes neighborhood of San Carlos:

• It's the northernmost neighborhood in San Carlos.
• For 2025, it ranked 4th out the six San Carlos neighborhoods for the highest average sales price.
• Hilly terrain leads to fabulous views of the Bay Area.
• It's the only neighborhood in San Carlos that is entirely in the Carlmont High School Boundary.
• Like its sibling neighborhoods in San Carlos, Cordes enjoyed robust market performance in 2025, driven in part by lower than average inventory.

I hope you enjoyed this check-in. If you live in Cordes, please drop a comment below about what you like (or don't like) about living in this part of San Carlos. And stay tuned next week when I do a similar check-in on a different San Carlos neighborhood!