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930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

930 Chestnut is a preserved Victorian set deep on its lot behind Thomas Church designed gardens. Yours now for $6.850M

Photo: Open Homes Photography Via Malin Giddings, Compass

Ina Claire owned 930 Chestnut in the 1940s. She was a stage actress and vaudeville performer. Courtesy Compass Realty.

Ina Claire owned 930 Chestnut in the 1940s. She was a stage actress and vaudeville performer. Courtesy Compass Realty.

A Pacific Heights abode, tucked back from Chestnut Street on San Francisco’s Russian Hill is a classic Victorian, circa 1900. Such an idyllic little piece of history comes with a big price tag: $6.85 million.

The Cary House

This pretty three story home , known historically as “The Cary House,” is four bedrooms, three and a half baths. Gleaming wood floors lead from the entry hall through the living room, into the formal dining room where french doors open onto a brick patio.

The eat-in kitchen has been updated without killing the original intent of the home’s architecture.

Brass and crystal chandeliers here, originally designed for gas, are heirlooms: they were once owned by Thomas Carr Howe, curator of the Legion of Honor.

Upstairs bedrooms offer vistas of the glittering Bay. And the elevator makes life in a three story house easier.

The five most expensive zip codes in the Bay Area.

Media: San Francisco Chronicle

Outside

Because the house is set back on its garden-filled lot (5,153 square feet of lot, per the listing), it enjoys a private, serene setting unusual in the city. These gardens are historic as well, designed by SF’s own Thomas Church.

A one car garage rounds out the property’s amenities.

Property History

The first two years after it was built, the Cary House stood all alone on Chestnut Hill, surrounded by pear trees.

The home is one of very few on the east side of the hill that survived the 1906 Earthquake and fire.

Its first owner was Gould and Curry (the silver mining company) owner Alpheus Bull, and then passed into the hands of James and Elizabeth Cary, who owned the home until the mid 1920s.

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In the 1940s, Ina Claire Wallace, a vaudeville performer, purchased Cary House.  She enlisted William Wurster for interior renovations and Thomas Church for landscaping. A historic drawing of Time Magazine with Ina Claire on the cover is included in the gallery above.

Now yours?

Built over a hundred years ago, 930 Chestnut has changed hands more than a few times, but most recently in 2007, when the price was $3,100,000. Today, that same house asks $6,850,000.

See the full listing here.

Anna Marie Erwert writes from both the renter and new buyer perspective, having (finally) achieved both statuses. She focuses on national real estate trends, specializing in the San Francisco Bay Area and Pacific Northwest. Follow Anna on Twitter: @AnnaMarieErwert

Article source: https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/San-Francisco-real-estate-930-Chestnut-St-12728989.php

f11photo/Shutterstock

• More residents are leaving San Francisco than any other city in the country, according to data from real estate website Redfin.
• A growing number of those considering the move are Silicon Valley investors, The New York Times reports.
• The migration has become so intense that it’s creating a shortage of U-Haul vans in the Bay Area, and inflating prices so that it costs thousands to go from San Jose to Las Vegas, but only $100 to go in the opposite direction.
• Startup founders and venture capitalists have little reason to stay and invest in expensive real estate, especially since today’s technology makes working remotely so seamless.

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The sky-high rent and cost of living that we’ve come to expect from the Bay Area might have finally taken their toll on a large proportion of residents. A huge wave of people are considering more affordable cities outside of the tech capital of the world, and they’re taking their startups — and investors — with them, as Kevin Roose reported in The New York Times.

San Francisco lost more residents than any other city in the country in the last quarter of 2017, according to data from real estate website Redfin, which sampled a million users. The data factored in the number of residents that cities gained, meaning San Francisco lost a net 15,489 residents; about 24% more than the next highest loser on the list, New York City.

This is expected to continue into 2018, considering that as of February 2018, 49% of Bay Area residents were looking to move out of San Francisco, according to a survey by public relations firm Edelman.

If that data isn’t enough evidence of a heavy migration, consider the shortage of U-Haul moving vans in the Bay Area, which has inflated costs so much that it costs $2,000 to rent a truck from San Jose to Las Vegas — but only costs $100 the other way around, according to local news reporter Michelle Robertson from SFGate. In fact, it costs twice as much to rent a truck from San Jose to almost any other destination city than to rent the same vehicle in the opposite direction.

The migration away from San Francisco isn’t a completely new phenomenon, since rent has been increasing at an incredible rate for years. But the recent tax reform has made life even more expensive for residents, pushing entrepreneurs (and their ideas) towards fast-growing metros. Others, like Peter Thiel, who can afford the price to live there, have attributed their move to a more left-leaning and less tolerant cultural atmosphere that leaves little room for freedom of opinion.

Many investors, like those referenced in Roose’s New York Times article, are finding that cities outside of San Francisco are thriving with opportunity. Startup founders and venture capitalists have little reason to stay and invest in expensive real estate, especially since applications like Slack, the inter-company messaging platform, and video conferencing tools make working remotely so seamless.

You can read more about how Silicon Valley investors are feeling about life outside of the Bay Area over at The New York Times.

Article source: http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-bay-area-residents-moving-away-increase-u-haul-rental-prices-2018-3

Mr. Thiel’s criticisms were echoed by Michael Moritz, the billionaire founder of Sequoia Capital. In a recent Financial Times op-ed, Mr. Moritz argued that Silicon Valley had become slow and spoiled by its success, and that “soul-sapping discussions” about politics and social injustice had distracted tech companies from the work of innovation.

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Complaints about Silicon Valley insularity are as old as the Valley itself. Jim Clark, the co-founder of Netscape, famously decamped for Florida during the first dot-com era, complaining about high taxes and expensive real estate. Steve Case, the founder of AOL, has pledged to invest mostly in start-ups outside the Bay Area, saying that “we’ve probably hit peak Silicon Valley.”

But even among those who enjoy living in the Bay Area, and can afford to do so comfortably, there’s a feeling that success has gone to the tech industry’s head.

“Some of the engineers in the Valley have the biggest egos known to humankind,” Mr. Khanna, the Silicon Valley congressman, said during a round-table discussion with officials in Youngstown. “If they don’t have their coffee and breakfast and dry cleaning, they want to go somewhere else. Whereas here, people are hungry.”

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This isn’t a full-blown exodus yet. But in the last three months of 2017, San Francisco lost more residents to outward migration than any other city in the country, according to data from Redfin, the real estate website. A recent survey by Edelman, the public relations firm, found that 49 percent of Bay Area residents, and 58 percent of Bay Area millennials, were considering moving away. And a sharp increase in people moving out of the Bay Area has led to a shortage of moving vans. (According to local news reports, renting a U-Haul for a one-way trip from San Jose to Las Vegas now costs roughly $2,000, compared with just $100 for a truck going the other direction.)

For both investors and rank-and-file workers, one appeal of noncoastal cities is the obvious cost savings. It’s increasingly difficult to justify doling out steep salaries and lavish perks demanded by engineers in the Bay Area, when programmers in other cities can be had for as little as $50,000 a year. (An entry-level engineer at Facebook or Google might command triple or quadruple that amount.)

When you invest in a San Francisco start-up, “you’re basically paying landlords, Twilio, and Amazon Web Services,” said Ms. Bannister of Founders Fund, referring to the companies that provide start-ups with messaging services and data hosting.

Granted, California still has its perks. Venture capital investment is still largely concentrated on the West Coast, as are the clusters of talented computer scientists who emerge from prestigious schools like Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. Despite the existence of tools like Slack, which make remote work easier, many tech workers feel it’s still an advantage to be close to the center of the action.

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But the region’s advantages may be eroding. Google, Facebook and other large tech companies have recently opened offices in cities like Boulder, Colo. and Boston, hoping to attract new talent as well as accommodating requests from existing employees looking to move elsewhere. And the hot demand for engineers in areas like artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles has led companies to expand their presence near research universities, in cities like Pittsburgh and Ann Arbor. Then there is HQ2, Amazon’s much-ballyhooed search for a second headquarters, which seems to have convinced some tech executives that cities between the coasts may be viable alternatives.

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Venture capitalists, who recognize a bargain when they see one, have already begun scouring the Midwest. Mr. Case and Mr. Vance recently amassed a $150 million fund called “Rise of the Rest.” The fund, which was backed by tech luminaries including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Eric Schmidt, the former executive chairman of Alphabet, will invest in start-ups throughout the region.

But it’s not just about making money. It’s about social comfort, too. Tech companies are more popular in noncoastal states than in their own backyards, where the industry’s effect on housing prices and traffic congestion is more acutely felt. Most large tech companies still rate highly in national opinion surveys, but only 62 percent of Californians say they trust the tech industry, and just 37 percent trust social media companies, according to the Edelman survey. So you can start to understand the appeal of a friendlier environment.

During the Akron stop of the bus trip, while the Silicon Valley investors mingled with local officials over a dinner spread of vegan polenta pizza and barbecue sliders, Mr. McKenna, the San Francisco venture capitalist, told me that he felt a difference in people’s attitudes in cities like these, where the tech industry’s success is still seen as something to celebrate.

“People want to be in places where they’re the hero,” he said.

Correction: March 4, 2018

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified the mayors of two cities in Ohio. Mayor Jamael Tito Brown of Youngstown was on the left and Mayor William Franklin of Warren was on the right.

An earlier version of this article misstated J.D. Vance’s status as an investor in tech start-ups. He is currently a venture capitalist, not a former investor.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/technology/silicon-valley-midwest.html

SUNNYVALE (KPIX 5) — A tiny house in Sunnyvale brought in a big sale price and smashed a real estate record.

Coldwell Bank realtor Doug Larson said, “I expected a higher offer than the list price.”

In the Bay Area’s red-hot housing market that’s not unusual, but the offer they got for this modest Sunnyvale home was unusual.

Larson said, “I was more than a little surprised — pleasantly surprised.”

The two-bedroom, one-bathroom home in Sunnyvale’s Cherry Chase neighborhood was listed at $1.45 million. But before it even officially went on the market, a private buyer ponied up $2 million in cash.

So, why this home, in this neighborhood?

Larson says it’s close to a number of tech companies, including Apple’s spaceship campus.

“Sunnyvale is the heart of Silicon Valley. It’s close to all the employers in the high-tech industry,” Larson said.

Still, the home sold in record time for a record price: At $2,358 per square foot.

It’s the highest price per square foot for a home in Sunnyvale…ever.

Neighbor Florence Winslow said, “This is pretty spectacular. I understand it’s a big lot. Maybe, the buyer plans to tear it down and build a great-big house someday.”

So, money always talks. And coming in a half million over the asking price didn’t hurt.

But the buyer also wrote a personal letter to the seller, from one cat owner to another.

He told her how much his cats would love living in her home someday. It was part of the personal touch that helped the sale speed through.

According to Zillow, homes in Sunnyvale had been selling for an average of just over $1.5 million in January, but that number is expected to rise.

Article source: http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/02/house-apple-spaceship-campus-sunnyvale-real-estate/

Alphabet, Apple, and Facebook have tens of thousands of employees in the Bay Area, all of whom need space to do their jobs. As a result, the tech giants command millions of square feet in the region.

Alphabet alone owns or leases 19.9 million square feet in the Bay Area, nearly four times as much as the area’s largest commercial real estate firm, Hudson Pacific Properties, according to the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Business Times.

Next up? San Jose, which tech firms are eyeing to escape San Francisco’s skyrocketing real estate prices.

Article source: https://qz.com/1216164/the-size-of-silicon-valleys-bay-area-real-estate-empires-charted/