Condo and single-family home markets keep diverging in San Mateo County: Median home price increases to nearly $2.2M, while condo market dips 7% from last year

Single-family home prices have kept escalating, partly attributable to a perpetual lack of supply relative to demand and further exacerbated by the AI boom.  

“There is a lot of wealth that’s being created all over the spectrum, where [employees] started working at an AI company that went from $5 billion to all of a sudden a $500 billion valuation,” Compass Real Estate Realtor Raziel Ungar said. “Even Oracle, Google, Apple — they handle a lot of the funding for what’s going on behind the scenes, so we’re also seeing that spillover.”

One employee of a successful AI company purchasing a home in a neighborhood can have an outsized impact on surrounding home values, he added.  

Robert Pedro, president of Signature Realty, said one-third of the home sales in a subsection of Redwood City’s Centennial neighborhood last year came from Nvidia employees. 

“There were 12 [sales] and four were from Nvidia,” Pedro said. “I can’t speak to whether that definitively pushed the price up or not, but I know the prices did very well that year.”

Buyers are not necessarily concentrating that wealth in affluent cities, like Hillsborough or Atherton, or in the most high-end neighborhoods of cities like Burlingame or San Mateo either — rather, they’re often purchasing homes in the $2.5 million to $3 million range, traditionally in more modest neighborhoods, with the intention of taking on major renovations. Mitch Speigle, Sequoia Real Estate Realtor, said a client of his recently bought a $3 million home in Redwood City, paying about 70% upfront, with plans to transform it according to their style. Some of that is driven by the desire to be closer to attractive parts of each city, like downtown districts, or closer to the highway to get to and from their offices. Families are also less tied to school districts, often opting for private school enrollment instead. 

“It’s similar in that if one person comes in and spends money, everything goes up,” Speigle said of the effects of the AI boom. “What is a little different from years prior is that we are seeing that these homes are not necessarily always in the A+ markets. We are seeing a lot that are in Redwood City, San Carlos and closer to [Highway] 101, in neighborhoods where they haven’t experienced someone coming in to do that before.”

New listings increased slightly since March 2025 by about 12%, which Cliff Whearley, owner of Whearley & Co., attributes largely to the interest rate environment over the last few years. 

“People can only wait so long for interest rates to drop before they have to move,” he said. “If they have another kid, or someone can’t do stairs anymore, a few years goes by, and they say, ‘I have to do it.’” 

Even with the modest increase in listings, however, demand still far outpaces the number of available homes for sale, keeping prices elevated. That’s been a long-standing trend, often attributed to a mix of state and federal tax policies that can create disincentives for older homeowners to downsize, such as the capital gains tax, Pedro said.  

“Every year I physically list two or three homes, where I have the listing agreement in hand, and I say, ‘you need to talk to your tax person, because you’re going to owe $250,000,’” he said. 

The condominium market, however, has swung in the opposite direction as the single-family market. Median sale prices have seen a steady decline over the last couple years, dropping from $887,000 in March 2024 to $855,000 in 2025 to $825,000 last month. 

Due to a heavy state-level push to build more housing, an increasing number of units have either been built or are in cities’ development pipelines compared to years past. In areas like the Peninsula, most of that new housing comes in the form of multiunit apartments, and while most are rentals, apartment tenants tend to have more demographic similarities with condo owners compared to single-family home owners. That means the additional supply of multiunit housing, whether for-sale or rental, can keep prices at bay. 

Condo owners also tend to be more interest-rate sensitive than single-family home owners, and homeowner association costs have also produced additional strain, as monthly rates for owners have increased and skyrocketing insurance premiums have weakened many HOAs’ fiscal health. 

“Lots of HOA reserves are below funding guidelines, and lenders require a certain amount of health from HOAs, and if those numbers fall below that, it becomes difficult to finance those properties,” Speigle said.