Local Business

As Q1 2025 data reveals, Healdsburg’s real estate market is defying conventional wisdom with a 150% surge in luxury home sales while Sonoma County’s high-end market continues to decline. These counterintuitive trends are reshaping our understanding of the local market in ways that might surprise even longtime residents.

Being able to collect nutritious food while wearing a t-shirt that is both comfortable and trendy is a win-win for Farm to Pantry. Gapelii Brand, a Sonoma County Black-owned luxury brand, was co-founded by Andrew Akufo in 2019 and features clothing and accessories. Through his work, he met Kelly Conrad, development director from Farm to Pantry. Conrad reached out to Akufo to collaborate and provide T-shirts for volunteers that could feature Gapelii Brand’s style and promote the organization.

What makes Healdsburg’s market particularly unique is the continued dominance of non-primary residence purchases. In 2024, 61% of all purchases were for second homes or investment properties, with rural properties showing an even higher rate at 76%. This tracks with 2023 when 64% of properties were purchased as non-primary residences, writes a local realtor.

In this "web extra," we take readers inside the JANE Dispensary. It officially opened last week right next to the Coyote Sonoma, a tasting room for Wilson wines and live music venue (aka the “Coyote Den”).

There’s a widespread sentiment in the wine industry: “It takes a lot of good beer to make a good bottle of wine.” So when Paul Stokeld suggested the name, “Elephant in the Room,” to co-owner KC Mosso for their planned watering hole in Healdsburg, Mosso...

It’s with an eye toward making the most of that most valuable of assets—parking in Healdsburg—that Mat Humphrey is filling up the available leases on the property at 44 Mills St. one by one, and staggering their prime hours so the lot is productively filled as much as possible. The highest and best use, one might say, to echo the realtor’s mantra.

Take 401 Piper St. It was a great product, so we priced it at the absolute top end of comparable properties and we found two buyers to bid up the price beyond expectations to sell it in a day. The buyers were out-of-town buyers looking for a retirement place—the perfect buyers.

SPONSORED – If you live in Sonoma County, you’ve likely seen Food for Thought volunteers collecting food donations at local grocery stores nearly every weekend of the year. And if you’ve ever donated food, money, or time as a volunteer, everyone at Food For Thought thanks you!

Sponsored post — On Thursday, December 3, 2020 Food For Thought hosts its 19thannual fundraising event inviting Sonoma County residents to “Dine In” by ordering takeout from local restaurants and to make a donation to Food For Thought, a nonprofit organization that provides healing food and nutrition to more than 1,400 people living with HIV, COVID-19 and other serious illnesses in Sonoma County.

SPONSORED - Osmosis offered it’s first cedar enzyme bath in Sonoma County in May of 1985 in a handcrafted structure made from recycled wood in a friend’s back yard. Founder Michael Stusser had his life changed when he experienced the enzyme bath for the first time while living in Japan. “As the healing warmth of the bath enveloped my being, the whole picture of a healing sanctuary with a magical fermentation bath at the core surrounded by meditative Japanese style gardens, architecture and gracious hospitality flashed before my minds eye. From this remarkable moment I knew it was my calling to come back to Sonoma County and recreate the Japanese enzyme bath in West,” Stusser says.