‘Ultra expensive’ Bay Area city named most popular market in California

A technology hub in the heart of Silicon Valley has just been named Zillow’s most popular market in California by 2024, which also became the only location on the West Coast to secure a top-10 spot on Real Estate Market’s list of the most desirable cities in the entire United States.

This city was Sunnyvale – the former home of Atari and now a destination for a number of technology companies, including LinkedIn and Yahoo – which employs just over 87,000 people. Zillow determined the rankings based on a number of housing metrics for cities with a population of at least 100,000 people, including page view traffic, home value growth and how quickly homes sold, senior economist Orphe Divounguy told SFGATE.

Other cities that made the U.S. rankings list were mostly suburban or “smaller cities located outside the suburbs, yet within commuting distance of a major metropolitan area,” the Zillow release said. They spanned the East Coast, including Manchester, New Hampshire at No. 1, as well as Stamford, Connecticut and Columbia, Maryland, with two midwestern outliers in Rockford and Peoria, Illinois. That’s a marked shift from 2021, when Zillow first started collecting data and found one close to sweeping of the west coast cities as the year’s most in demand.

Among the national contenders, and in what will come as a surprise to no one, “Sunnyvale stands out as being ultra expensive,” Divounguy said. “To have a relatively small share of Zillow surfers coming from outside the metro area indicates that Sunnyvale was likely a prime target for homebuyers in Silicon Valley, where the high price tags won’t come with as much sticker shock because, how expensive nearby areas are too.”

Still, Sunnyvale home values ​​typically hover just above $2 million, making it more affordable compared to nearby Bay Area cities such as Palo Alto, where the median home value is around $3.4 million, Cupertino, where values ​​hover around 2, $9 million, and Los Altos, which tops out at over $4 million, according to Zillow data.

Of the top 10 cities in California, half were in the Bay Area and ranked as follows:

1. Sunnyvale
2. Temecula
3. Simi Valley
4. Fremont
5. Vacaville
6. Fairfield
7. Salinas
8. Santa Clara
9. Visalia
10. Elglund

Elizabethtown, Penn. was named the most popular small town, while Portland, Maine was named the most popular vacation town. Pahrump, Nevada topped the list of most popular retirement towns.

SFGATE California editor Tessa McLean contributed to this report.