OP-ED: The Truth Behind Silicon Valley's Housing Crisis

First Image: Available homes in Mountain View have declined since 2013. Second Image: Average home prices in Mountain View have steadily climbed in the last 12 months.

By Agent Ace / Marni Epstein:

The San Jose metro area has transformed from a small farming community with vast amounts of land, to the thriving high tech hub with a housing shortage that it is today. But how bad is that housing shortage, really? Well, the San Jose metro area’s city of Mountain View serves as an example of just how dire things have gotten. San Jose Inside notes, rental housing in the area is as scarce as a…well, the Macintosh Classic. The situation for buyers is equally bad.

A new analysis from nation real estate brokerage and Realtor matching service, Agent Ace, shows that compared to 2013, new listings to hit the market in 2014 fell by 18%. In October of 2013 there were 74 homes that came available, however in October 2014 that number shrunk to just 45 – totals have dropped even further in the last two months. The once-bedroom community has, of course, attracted droves of well-heeled professionals to work at the headquarters of tech companies like LinkedIn, Mozilla, and of course, Google. The ‘Googleplex,’ as the Google’s campus is lovingly nicknamed, has two million square feet of office space. That two million square feet translates into a lot of employees, looking for a lot of housing.

This decrease in inventory has been a catalyst for increased home prices. In 2014, prices went up 16% from 2013 levels. The average list price of a Mountain View, CA home now sits at $949,298.

With homes both pricier and harder to find than ever, they are not sitting on the market for very long. By the end of 2014, homes were selling in an absurdly low 37 days, on average – 10% faster than 2013. All of this is further placed into perspective when you consider that the escrow process is about 30 days of that total; so really, you can figure that a Mountain View home will last no more than seven on the market. That’s not even long enough for the “For Sale” sign to take root in the front yard.