Silicon Valley real estate, explained by the Property Nerds®

Homeowners insurance used to be a checkbox near the end of escrow. In California today it’s worth lining up early, while you can still walk away. Standard policies here leave out earthquake and flood, lenders have their own rules, and wildfire risk has changed who will write a policy. Here’s what bu

A few months after you close on a home in California, a property tax bill you may not expect shows up: the supplemental bill. It catches the county’s tax up from the seller’s old assessed value to your purchase price, and in Silicon Valley, where many homes sell to their first new owner in decades,

Every home sale in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties pays a county transfer tax when the deed is recorded. A handful of cities add their own, and San Francisco runs its own brackets. On the same price, the total can run from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands depending on the city. Here’s