Silicon Valley in pictures?

It’s hard when you’re thinking of relocating to a new area which is unfamiliar to you. You want to know what it looks like  – how are the homes, shops, streets, schools compared to where you live?

Aside from travelling there and driving around, taking in as much as you can visually, as well as emotionally and practically (can we afford this area? What are the schools like?), there is not much you can do to get the “feel” of a place… Until now. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology I can load photos of all the areas in the Bay Area of any interest onto my website, not just the “tourist” areas, but the places that families and individuals who are moving here would like to see – streets, parks, schools, shops.

So I’m beginning my tour of the Bay Area with Sunnyvale – easiest place to start as I live here. Check out the photos of this wonderful town on the cities page. And let me know what you’d like to see there. If there’s anything in Silicon Valley that I can point and shoot at, consider it done!

Anything to help my customers get themselves situated in this beautiful part of the world!

Heady Inauguration to Housing Desperation

We started today with a spirit of hope in Obama and his new administration. Yes, he has his work cut out, but, just like the lame horse who comes through to win the race in the end, many of us are backing one man whom we believe will get to the finish line. He has a huge, nay colossal, task ahead of him, and yes, very few people would wish to be in his shoes, but the hope and faith of many go with him.

So yesterday, the pomp and circumstance of the Inauguration, the dreams and aspirations of millions, today the crashing reality of the economic depression echoed in Mercury News‘ story of doom and gloom in the Bay Area housing market.

To paraphrase : 50% of all houses sold are due to foreclosures according to one survey by Dataquick. The median sale price of all homes dropped 31.8 percent from last January to December, the largest decline they’ve ever recorded. Realtors’ inventory is flooded, and there’s no sign of the job market improving with companies like Intel announcing its closure of its Silicon Valley chip factory. So not good news for many homeowners in this area, if you’re trying to sell or have a mortgage beyond your means.

The only people who may feel warm and fuzzy about this market are those looking to move into Silicon Valley and buy a home. House prices are not only lower than they have been in several years, they are negotiable, and if you have the good fortune to be one of the few who has been offered employment in this area recently and are thinking of moving here, buy now and good luck to you.

As Silicon Valley’s premier relocation company, we have plenty of expertise to help you find the perfect home and move into your perfect neighborhood. Silicon Valley is still a GREAT place to live!

I end with a quote from Peter Carey’s article in the Mercury News and the Dataquick’s table below :

DECEMBER HOME SALES AND PRICES

In some counties, purchases of previously foreclosed homes helped drive sales higher last month compared to December 2007. In the most expensive counties, sales slowed. Median prices fell across the region. Data measure sales of resale houses, unless noted otherwise.

County or area	Number sold	Chg. from Dec. 2007	Median price	Chg. from Dec. 2007
Alameda	1,134	95.9%	$350,000	-36.7%
Contra Costa	1,384	152.6%	$240,000	-48.4%
Marin	114	-20.3%	$675,000	-19.2%
Napa	89	97.8%	$370,000	-30.7%
San Francisco	180	-19.6%	$652,500	-11.8%
San Mateo	343	-3.7%	$565,000	-26.1%
Santa Clara	877	21.6%	$457,000	-38.2%
Santa Cruz	121	31.5	$429,000	-36.9%
Solano	623	185.8%	$215,000	-41.1%
Sonoma	427	98.6%	$320,000	-26.7%
Bay Area	5,171	69.6%	$330,000	-46.8%
Santa Clara condos	249	6.9%	$300,000	-38.0%
Bay Area condos	1,009	25.8%	$247,341	-48.5%
Santa Clara all	1,265	0.0%	$436,000	-33.4%
Bay Area all	6,889	36.0%	$330,000	-43.8%

Santa Cruz County is not included in the Bay Area totals. Data is based on completed sales of previously owned single-family houses or condos as recorded by counties in December 2008. The Bay Area and Santa Clara County “all” figures are for new and resale houses and condos, combined.

2008’s Best Cities for Relocating Families

Worldwide ERC and Primacy Relocation announced on Thursday the findings of their fourth annual study which determines the best cities to move to for a successful relocation based on certain criteria for quality of life.  This year new categories were added :

” ……including recent job growth for 2007, percentage of nearby top-ranked colleges, average in-state tuition for four-year public colleges, percentage of population growth since 2000, amount of pediatricians per 100,000 population, and separate sales and income tax categories. Another new category is the green living index, which measures environmental incentives and policies, the availability of biofuel, wind power generation, and the amount of energy-efficient buildings.”

Interestingly, the metropolitan area of San Jose/Sunnyvale/Santa Clara which falls under the category of over 1,300,000 population (the largest of 3 categories), comes quite far down the chart at 40th, meaning that there are 39 cities more favorable to a successful relocation than Silicon Valley. Top of the list in order are Pittsburgh, Indianapolis/Carmel, Austin/Round Rock and Fort Worth/Arlington. So chances are, if you relocate to any of these places, you’ll stay put. Who’d have thought?

Now I don’t know about you, but I’ve been under the impression for a long while (pretty much all of the 12+ years I’ve lived here in Silicon Valley) that once you move here, you won’t want to leave either. But it seems that’s not always the case and I guess it can depend on how you move here.

Being in the relocation business, I’m constantly studying and re-evaluating what makes a successful relocation – it benefits our clients and the companies transferring them if the families we relocate here, stay here. But although I’m biased there is no doubt in my mind that using the expertise of a well-established relocation company considerably raises the odds of a successful relocation. Consider the issues that we take care of with your average relocation ( well documented on our website) :

Personal Profile Development (we find out all about you and your family before you visit)

Area orientation tour (we drive you round the communities which we think would best suit your living requirements and answer ALL your questions about living here)

Finding a home (rentals or purchase – we put you in touch with realty experts to find your perfect home)

School visits (kids need to see where they’re going to school, let’s go visit the principal and get a tour)

Banking, shopping, drivers license (we get you situated with all that paperwork)

Spousal assistance (your spouse wants to work as well or take an adult education class? – we help you find those opportunities)

Networking (finding your home from home – that truly is one of the key elements in relocation – getting involved with other families like yourself, making friends with the same interests – we help you connect)

Cross Cultural Training (coming from a different country and culture can be very daunting – we take you step by step through the integration process to help you feel comfortable and knowledgeable in your new community)

Ongoing Assistance (we stay in touch with you for the first six months after you’ve moved here so you’ll always have a friendly and helpful voice at the end of the phone)

Because we look after our clients with such a personalized service and don’t let go of them until we’re sure they’re well settled into their new community, our relocation success rate is veryhigh.

And I do know, that not getting the relocation service treatment when I moved here with my family in 1995, made it much harder and took much longer for me to feel happy in my new home.

How about you?  Have you relocated to where you are now?  Did you use a relocation service?  Or did you have to settle here, find a home and schools, friends and community, by yourself?  What made the relocation successful or not, for you?

I’d love to hear your stories.

They WILL grow up!

I recently read a blog from a local Silicon Valley realtor about how schools in Sunnyvale affect house prices. Interesting article, nothing earth shattering, as we do know that the higher the API scores of a school, the higher the house prices are likely to be. Whether we believe this to be fair or right and what we classify as a “good school” is for another discussion. And if you need some help knowing what to look for in a school, look here.

What I want to point out is how short-sighted we can be when it comes to buying a home in an area based on the “quality” of the local elementary school. What about the middle and high school?

Your kids may be pre-schoolers or not yet even born but they will grow older – hard to believe, but true! Mine were 5, 3 and 20 weeks till birth when we moved here from the UK, and now my oldest is 18, a senior in high school. When we looked at houses way back, we found one we loved, the price was OK, didn’t know anything about the area and we didn’t look past the local elementary school, and even then with just a cursory glance at the building and a meeting with the Kindergarten teacher – lovely lady. So we bought our house and left the schools in the lap of the gods.

But we were just lucky, I guess. We ended up in a school district which we’re very happy with and have never thought about moving. However, the same story isn’t true for some of my friends. When their kids got to 8th grade, they had to move house, as they weren’t happy with the local high school. One family I know, even moved house during her daughter’s elementary school years and then moved again during middle school to avoid the local high school!

Moving home just because of the school can be avoided if they’d been advised to look at all 3 schools before they bought. It’s an expensive affair to move house, what with realtor fees, likely increased property taxes etc.

So my advice to you if you’re relocating to Silicon Valley and have school age children is :

Information is power – look ahead and stay put!

Why is our grass so important?

As baseball season rolls around again, I think back to a couple of years ago when it rained… and rained….and rained! Opening Day was postponed, every practice was cancelled until FINALLY the sun came out and we could start the baseball season – about a month late. My son was playing soccer then as well, and it was a similar story.

I remember telling my sister in the UK about this at the time, and she just laughed and said that if they postponed every soccer, cricket and rugby practice and game over there every time it rained, they would never get through the season!

I wonder why we take such enormous pride in keeping our fields perfectly green, with no brown mud showing at the expense of forfeiting or postponing our kids’ baseball and soccer games. Is it because we’ve spent so much of our taxpayers’ money watering the darn grass, that there’s no way we going to have kids running all over it and muddying it up? Or is it because we take such pleasure in seeing our green parks dotted throughout our Silicon Valley suburbs that we absolutely refuse to let that scene by spoilt by children’s games when it rains?

Either way, it seems a shame to me, and I have a wry smile on my face when I envision my nieces and nephews over there in Yorkshire, running around on the muddy fields, not caring a jot that it’s slippery and muddy. Who knows, maybe they actually prefer it that way!

Does anyone know why we are so protective of our green grass?  Is this just another quirk of Silicon Valley life, or do I file this under “American traditions?”

Buyers? No cellars!

Photo Credit : Dancer01

If you’re moving to Silicon Valley, be warned – 99% of the homes here do not have cellars – or attics! So, if, like me, you are used to plenty of storage above and below your house, you will be disappointed when you arrive with your truck/ship load of goods. Where to store them? No cellars here!

Relocating to Silicon Valley 12 years ago, we brought everything we owned from our three-storey London house, except for the electrical appliances which of course wouldn’t work without those bulky non-heat resistant transformers.  A garage sale took care of those.

So, the revelation that the sum total of our storage space in our new home consisted of a closet in each bedroom and one in the hall, left us totally in the dark as to where to put everything. “Not to worry,”  remarked my very handy husband who proceeded to turn the garage into, not only a place to keep a car – good idea – but also everything else that didn’t fit into our 3 bedroom ranch-style home, building shelves along the walls and rafters in the ceiling – and we still had boxes full of STUFF left over!

The question we kept asking ourselves as we opened the boxes was “Why did we bring this?” So I just wanted to warn any of you thinking of bringing those large unused things – DON’T!!

How many boxes do you still have unopened in your garage? And what, for heaven’s sake, is in them?

Pass the salt, I mean ketchup, please

Photo Credit : Paha_L

Musing about the British pub in an earlier blog got me wondering if the pub is the only facet of our social lives which is different here in the US than in the UK.

One tradition I remember finding different when I first moved here was the assumption we would bring the kids along when invited to dinner at friends’ houses. In London, we got a babysitter and we went out without them.

Growing up in the UK, the DP (Dinner Party) was part of my social culture. As a kid, I vividly remember helping my parents prepare for guests, cooking in the kitchen, hoovering the floor, laying the table, maybe passing out some peanuts and vol-au-vents after they’d arrived, but then hiding upstairs with my sister and listening to the sounds of tinkling glasses and adult laughter, until one of my parents, usually my Mum, remembered about us and sent us to bed.

I carried on the tradition before and after I got married and even AK (after kids) for the first few years in London. Having friends over to dinner required them to get babysitters so we could have “adult” conversation without any annoying interruptions from the little people. After relocating to Silicon Valley, I noticed things were different. Families invited us – and I mean “us” as in the whole family – the kids came too – and we just hoped and assumed they would mingle with the other kids and leave us alone. We soon joined this new tradition and the DP became a very unusual and almost eccentric phenomenum.

So why this difference in social happenings? I have come up with the following suggestions:

Are we more “into” our kids? Do we see them as just an extension of us and we want them around?

Do we have a greater need to reinforce family values? Do we think there’s work go be done here and we’re trying to safeguard that sense of family?

Do we feel that our weekly lives in Silicon Valley are so separate from each other’s? Our kids have back-to-back after-school schedules, the parents have jobs that keep them out of the home for too long, so do our weekends need to be spent together with our kids as much as possible?

Is it financial? After all, why pay a babysitter when the kids can come along too? Babysitters are expensive (I know, I have two teenage daughters!)

Is it because of the great weather with which we are blessed leading into much more outdoor entertaining? Hence the BBQ – kids can eat that stuff too, just throw a few hot dogs on the grill for them.

Are Americans just more laid-back, and happy to do the mingling thing with everyone, including kids? Who needs the formality of sitting around a dining room table, talking the weather and current affairs?

Does it come down to a class thing in the UK, which doesn’t exist here in the same way, where DP’s are the middle classes’ inherited form of “Nanny’s taking care of the kids, let the adults enjoy each other’s company?”

I haven’t quite decided what the reason is for the whole family entertaining thing over here versus the “parents without kids” choice over there. Maybe it’s a little of everything, maybe it’s changed in the UK too, with more outings enjoyed by the whole family.

What do you do? Do you entertain with or without kids? And why?

 

 

An Englishman’s Perspective of Silicon Valley

I’m back.

I’ve been away from blogging for a little while, mainly because my brother was visiting from the UK, and I just took time out to hang with him. I had mentioned him in a previous blog – he’s the cyclist.

However, his main goal while he was here was not finding a mini tour de Silicon Valley en bicyclette – he came equipped with ski boots ready for the snow. As you know if you read my blogs, we are frequent visitors to Bear Valley, so with the kids off school for the week, we took the opportunity to get Pete back onto his snow legs and he spent much of his visit bombing down mountains – speed is everything, as well as not falling down – that apparently is the mark of a great British skier!

We did spend a couple of days in the Bay Area and what was interesting from his visit was his perspective on all things Silicon Valley – a perspective I had 12 years ago when we moved here, but had forgotten – what he found unusual and different from his life in the UK.  So I made a list of his remarks, some interesting, some not so :

* Turning right at a red stop sign – a no no in the UK – took some getting used to.

* Foreign cars – lots of them, including Jags and Minis, but not too many American ones on the road

* A car is a perk in many jobs in the UK, not so here.

* He couldn’t believe how close we drive to each other on freeways, loved to quote the distance we should keep between cars in order to avoid fender benders; do they really drive that far apart in the UK?

* Impressed with the bike lanes, not too many over there but they’re working on it.

* Open-air swimming pools – where are the indoor ones?

* Three schools for our lovely kids to get through, instead of the two in the UK

* Our crazy property taxes!

* Loved my kitchen gadgets especially my strawberry/mushroom slicer - do we really have so many more gadgets than them?

* The sunshine…..a constant MOST of the year

* Proximity to sea AND mountains (mentioned in previous blog on (WHY we live here) 

* No pub – I’m with him there – wouldn’t it be great to wander down to the pub on a balmy summer evening and hang out with the locals?  Starbucks just doesn’t cut it.

I’m sure there’s more, but my memory fails me for the moment.  Any new arrivals in California still coming to terms with the way things work over here – what do YOU miss from your homeland?

Stay away from the chain gangs!

Having just spent the 3-day weekend with the family up at Bear Valley in the snow, with large chunks of that time sitting in our van in a line of traffic going as fast as the slowest vehicle on the road – the one creeping along with chains on, I thought I’d try and spread a few words about Spider Spikes. This may just help speed up the traffic from 5 mph to ooh, maybe 20 (in fact we have been known to drive easily at 40 mph).

For those not in the know, Spider Spikes fulfill the same function as snow chains except they are SO much easier to put on. You basically fit your front wheels with a permanent lock in the central hub and each time you need to use the Spider Spikes, you just clip them onto the tires. This is as opposed to the chains scenario – pulling, pushing, tugging, getting in the car and going forward 6 inches, pulling, pushing and tugging again, whilst trying not to get frostbite and keeping the cursing at a low decibel level so the kids won’t hear. And then driving at an all-time slow speed and doing who knows what damage to your tires and the road when the snow isn’t really there but they still insist you put chains on.

For those relocating from England, as I did to Silicon Valley, you may have no thoughts about the snow when you purchase your first car here. Even if you have and don’t think it’s worth getting a 4-wheel drive as you’re only going to be going up to the slopes once, maybe twice a year, good for you! They’re gas guzzlers and we don’t need any more of those on the road. So you may well end up with a vehicle that will need chains or Spider Spikes when you get to the snow.

Where do you purchase these? Well, they’re made in Switzerland and there is at least one distributor in the US, but instead of paying premium prices that way, you can go to Ebay and bid on them, which is how we found ours – and have been extremely happy the few times we’ve had to use them. I think we paid around $200, well worth every cent. Just make sure when you’re looking for ones for your car, that you have checked in the vehicle handbook for the size of the wheel and tires so you get the exact fit – not all tires are created equal!

And with our nifty Spider Spikes, we’ve been able to keep up with the 4-wheel drive vehicles – it’s certainly not us who are causing the long lines! We’ll see you on the slopes! Snow chain people, get with the program!

An Inflatable Christmas

Is it just me or is this the year of the Christmas inflatable? I know I’ve blogged about the American celebration before – their fondness for over-the-top celebrations and how far ahead of Britain they are in the “look at how many lights and flags and decorations and ornaments we can put up” race – but inflatables?

Lights I can deal with – colored ones, white ones, twinkling ones, icicle ones, flashing on and off ones, ones in the shape of a reindeer, even blue ones (no, I did not realise that these were Hannukah lights until it was explained to me) – but where did the inflatable Santa/snowman/igloo/airplane, yes, airplane come from? Target, you probably answer, hehe!

So, anyone moving here to Silicon Valley should be alerted to the American tradition of lighting up the outside of houses, yards, trees, bushes – in fact anything that grows out of the ground at Christmas time – whether it be with lights or inflatables or both.

It is a celebration of lights like no other and one which amazed me – the effort, time and dollar amount that went into these super-lit homes as soon as Thanksgiving was over – when I first arrived in California twelve years ago. And naturally, we have totally been sucked into this light mania, and have probably the most lit house in our street now. You will too, mark my words, when you move here!

But I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t find an inflatable Santa anywhere near our front yard…..