Quarterly Bay Area Home Price Map: How did your city do?

How this is measured. Each city's median price per square foot for closed sales in the twelve months to July 2026 is compared with the twelve months before that. Using full years on both sides means seasonality cancels out completely: every spring and every winter appears once on each side of the comparison. Price per square foot is used instead of median price because it does not swing when the mix of homes that happened to sell changes. August 2026 is excluded because closings for that month were still being reported when the data was pulled.

Houses and condos are counted separately and never mixed. They are two different markets and they moved differently this year. Condos here include townhouses, which the MLS files alongside them. Condo sales are also much thinner outside a few cities, so fewer places can be ranked on that side.

What a rank can and cannot tell you. A city needs at least 40 recent sales and 25 in the prior year to be ranked; below that it is reported without a rank, and below 15 sales not at all. Even so, a single city's figure is a summary of very different houses. The regional pattern — strength near San Francisco, weakness beyond twenty miles — holds in every quarter we tested. Where a specific city lands in the middle of the table is less firm than its position suggests, so read a mid-table rank as a neighborhood rather than a placing.

This is a city number, not your home's number. Condition, block, floor plan and timing move a single property far more than its city's median does. If you want to know what your own home did, ask us and we will look at it properly.