San Ramon Valley Unified: School Score 9.1/ Median Price per SF $304. House in San Ramon for sale.

Blanca Torres
Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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Location, location, location, right? Isn’t that the mantra for real estate valuation? But what if you have school-age kids? Then the real estate valuation mantra shifts: Location, location, schools.

For families with school-age kids, San Ramon ranks as the best place to buy a home based on school quality and home price, according to data from ZipRealty. Of the top 10 cities, all but two — Palo Alto and Benicia — were in the East Bay.

The Emeryville-based online residential real estate brokerage calculated which Bay Area cities had school districts with the highest test scores, lowest student/teacher ratios and lowest median price per square foot.

“We all know lots of factors — not just price per square foot — go into determining home values,” said Lanny Baker, ZipRealty CEO and president. “Among the most important of these factors for many families today is the quality of local schools in relation to the price of their local real estate.”

Here’s ZipRealty’s list of Top Ten School District Home Values in the Bay Area. Click to right to see slideshow of homes for sale.

Blanca Torres covers East Bay real estate for the San Francisco Business Times.

Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/2013/05/east-bay-schools-boost-real-estate.html

San Francisco Bay Area luxury real estate company Alain Pinel Realtors has redesigned its website, adding property search by keyword and by lifestyle attribute, and adds the ability to search for for-sale homes within school districts and by the number of days on the market.

The new site also features a more integrated global search capability, three new blogs, and a toolbox with a rent-vs.-buy calculator for property listings.

The new site features a lifestyle search that allows visitors to search for a home by some of the lifestyle attributes they want a home and its neighborhood to provide. It’s one of the highlights of the redesign, said Rainy Hake, executive vice president for Alain Pinel Realtor.

Filtered by county or neighborhood, the search prompts visitors to provide relative importance to a variety of home/location-related features of prospective homes, including: “school quality,” “the arts,” “entertainment/dining,” “family-friendly,” and “shops and services,” among other choices.

APR.com screenshot.

The new keyword search option allows homebuyers to search for listings using keywords that might turn up houses with certain unique attributes that would take much longer to find in conventional search.

The site also features a cool map-based orientation to the 11 San Francisco Bay Area counties that Alain Pinel services that allows visitors to select various towns within a county to see homes for sale, a short introduction to the market and fairly robust up-to-date market data.

The site will be mobile- and tablet-friendly soon, with a mobile app and an iPad app in development, said Hake.

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Article source: http://www.inman.com/news/2012/04/10/san-francisco-area-real-estate-firm-redesigns-website