If one noticed that Healdsburg’s median home price barely moved last spring, one would be forgiven for thinking the market went quiet. It settled at right around $1.16 million between April and June, almost exactly where it was a year earlier. Case closed, nothing to see.
Except that is not what happened. A closer look at the spring market reveals three very different Healdsburgs hiding inside one flat number.
Break the town’s sales into price ranges and every single one got more expensive over the past year. Homes under $1 million, homes between $1 and $3 million, and estates above $3 million all rose. The flat headline is not the story. It is barely a footnote to it.
So how can every range go up while the overall median stays put? The trick is in what a median actually is. It is not the average of all the sale prices added together. It is the price of the single home sitting in the exact middle when you line up every sale from cheapest to most expensive.
This spring a bigger share of the homes that sold were at the affordable end. Entry-level sales under $1 million grew from about 39% of the town’s closings a year ago to 46%. When more lower-priced homes join the line, the home standing in the middle of it is a cheaper one than the year before, even though homes of every type are selling for more. The middle number held flat because the mix shifted, not because prices stalled.
When looking segment by segment, the three Healdsburgs look nothing alike.
Segment by Segment
The affordable end is the fastest-moving corner of town. Genuinely affordable homes are rare here, and when one appears it goes quickly. Sales under $1 million jumped about 41% over the year and sold faster than anything else in Healdsburg.
The middle, from $1 to $3 million, is the heart of the market and the most interesting range this spring. Prices here rose the most of any tier, up roughly 14% to about $1.5 million, yet homes are taking the longest to sell, around 91 days against 62 a year ago. For local buyers that is the real headline: prices are up, but so is patience, and a well-prepared buyer has more room to negotiate here than almost anywhere in the county.
A good example of what this range offers just came to market on one of the valley’s best addresses, 3229 West Dry Creek Rd. A turnkey, newly remodeled home listed by BruingtonHargreaves at $2,195,000 on 6.3 acres in Dry Creek Valley, squarely in the $1 to $3 million range.
At the top, the estate tier is thin but setting records. Very few homes above $3 million trade in any given month, so the numbers swing, but the direction is clear. Healdsburg’s estate sales reached a June median near $7.85 million, up from about $6.5 million a year earlier. That mirrors the county, where luxury sales jumped more than 50%. Our read is that this is Bay Area money moving north, as San Francisco slips back into a bidding frenzy and prices buyers out toward Wine Country.
Step back and Healdsburg still looks like the calmest town in Sonoma County, with homes averaging about 80 days on market against 50 countywide. On the surface, patient and quiet. Underneath, three separate markets moving in three different directions.
That is the real lesson of the spring. The county number tells one the weather. The town number tells one the season. But the number for one’s own price range is the only one that tells a person what to actually do.
David Hargreaves is co-founder of BruingtonHargreaves. As such he has an economic interest in this story.
