Seven Bay Area Counties Gained Value This Year. We Were Not One of Them.

Seven of the nine Bay Area counties are worth more than they were a year ago. Sonoma County is not one of them. That sounds like bad news until you look at what happened to supply over the same twelve months, at which point it becomes something more useful: proof that the countywide median has almost nothing to tell you about your own house.

• Homes here took 62 days to sell in July. In the Bay Area as a whole, 22

• A Dry Creek winery pulled out its Zinfandel and planted 3,000 sunflowers, days before the county made crop swaps easier

• Gen Z has quietly started drinking wine again, which matters more to Wine Country values than anyone lets on

Everything below is worth about four minutes, which is roughly one glass on the patio before the light goes.

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Market Insight

Seven Bay Area Counties Gained Value This Year. We Were Not One of Them.

The median price of an existing single-family home in Sonoma County was $840,000 in July, down 0.6% on a year earlier. Across the nine Bay Area counties, seven were up over the same period. San Francisco rose 25.2%, Marin 8.9%, San Mateo 5.2%. Only Napa did worse than we did, at down 4.3%.

Now look at the number nobody quotes. Sonoma County's unsold inventory sat at 3.4 months in July, down from 3.7 a year ago. Supply got tighter and the median still slipped. A market genuinely losing altitude does not do that. What you are looking at is a change in what sold, not a change in what things are worth.

The third figure explains the mood better than either of the first two. A Sonoma County home took a median of 62 days to sell in July. Across the Bay Area it took 22. Same region on a map, entirely different market in practice.

Statewide, the share of California homes classed as equity-rich fell over the year, though a good part of that reflects a change in how it is measured rather than value actually lost.

None of which tells you what your house is worth. That is the real point. When the county median moves less than a percent and the top of the market moves 22%, the average has stopped describing anybody.

Real Estate News

Is The AI Money Is Coming North?

Something is moving up Highway 101. Over the last two years thousands of people at a handful of San Francisco AI companies have become extremely wealthy without selling a single share. Anthropic was valued at roughly $18.5 billion in early 2024 and sits near $965 billion after its latest round. The average technical employee at OpenAI holds around $1.5 million in stock compensation, more than seven times what Google staff received at the 2004 listing. That money is locked in private shares rather than bank accounts, and when it unlocks, a meaningful slice of it starts looking for land, privacy, and somewhere inside ninety minutes of the city.

Two things happened this month that make the case better than any forecast could.

The first: a ranch just outside Healdsburg set a local price record, bought by a tech entrepreneur. The second: a national news crew came to Sonoma County to film one of our own listings, because the seller had offered to accept $2 million in Anthropic stock in place of cash. We got offers. One of them came from someone who works at OpenAI. Landing national coverage for a Healdsburg listing does not happen by accident, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The county numbers are already moving. Sales above $3 million rose more than 50% through the second quarter against a year earlier. Absorption in that tier roughly doubled, from about 4% to about 8%. The luxury median climbed from the mid $3 millions to the mid $4 millions, up around 22%, while the countywide median went precisely nowhere.

One tier is running hot. The average is flat. Both things are true at once, and only one of them makes the news.

Local News

A Dry Creek Winery Pulled Its Zinfandel and Planted 3,000 Sunflowers

Chateau Diana took out 1.25 acres of Zinfandel next to its Dry Creek Valley tasting room this summer and put roughly 3,000 heirloom sunflowers in the ground instead. Visitors get pizza, wine and a field of them. It is the most cheerful possible version of a story the county has been having a much drier argument about.

Days earlier the Board of Supervisors backed changes to the ordinance that has governed vineyard planting since 2000, written after a landslide in 1998. The revision creates an easier permitting path for growers who want to swap one crop for another, provided the cultivated footprint stays the same. The Farm Bureau supports it. A second, formal vote is due in September.

Read those two things together and the message is fairly blunt. Pulling vines out is becoming administratively cheaper at precisely the moment more growers want to do it.

For anyone buying acreage here, that changes the question. The land you are looking at may not be a vineyard in ten years, and the county is quietly making it easier for it not to be. Worth asking what else the site can actually grow before you fall in love with the rows.

Local News

The Best Argument for Sonoma County Over Napa Is Fifteen Minutes From Healdsburg

Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport handled about 86,500 commercial passengers in May, its busiest month since airline service came back nineteen years ago. It is now planning fifteen years of expansion off the back of it: a consolidated rental car facility, reworked parking and roadways, new hangars and relocated airport offices.

We should say the quiet part out loud. Napa does not have this. For Bay Area second-home owners and early retirees who intend to travel, a commercial airport fifteen minutes from Healdsburg is not a convenience, it is a structural advantage that never shows up in a comparison of median prices.

It is also better than people assume. Salt Lake City, Los Angeles and Seattle all work as connecting hubs for international travel. I flew to Iceland a couple of weeks ago out of Santa Rosa with one short change in Seattle. No drive to SFO, no long-stay parking, no 4 a.m. alarm.

The honest counterweight: more flights mean more noise. The airport commission has just backed a scaled-back quiet-flying programme, including voluntary quiet hours, airline noise scorecards and a $270,000 study of new arrival and departure procedures running twelve to fifteen months. If you are buying under a flight path, that study is the thing to read before you write an offer.

Lifestyle News

Gen Z Is Not Killing Wine After All

For three years the received wisdom has been that the young do not drink, which happens to be the single best bear case anyone can make against Wine Country property values. The numbers have quietly stopped cooperating.

Nationally, the share of Gen Z adults who drank alcohol in the previous six months went from 46% in 2023 to 70% in 2025. Gen Z's share of US wine drinkers grew from 9% to 14% over a similar stretch. Millennials are now the largest wine-drinking cohort in the country, ahead of Boomers. Whatever is happening to wine, generational abandonment is not it.

A separate survey of 1,553 US wine drinkers found something more useful anyway. People are not short of interest, they are short of occasions:

• 61% say wine is almost always part of their get-togethers

• 41% would host more often if they had a specific reason to

• 77% blame busy schedules for not seeing friends more

• 65% visit a winery or tasting room at least several times a year

All of that is national data, not Sonoma County data. But it lines up with the single most common reason our clients give for buying here, which is almost never the vineyard views. It is having somewhere people will actually make the drive to. Turns out most of the country wants the same thing and cannot find the excuse.

Real Estate News

Nine in Ten Renovations Finish at or Over Budget

A national survey out this week found that 92% of homeowners who recently hired a professional finished at or above their budget. Not near it. At it or past it. Some 43% went over their original estimate outright, and more than a third of those overspent by at least 30%.

Appetite has not dimmed even slightly. Two thirds plan a major home investment within five years, and 56% expect to start or continue a project within three months. Day to day, the work is unglamorous: 58% completed a repair in the past month and 63% did maintenance.

We get asked some version of this every week by sellers preparing a long-held home. What should we fix before we list? The survey answers a different and more important question first. Assume you will go over. Which means the job is not choosing which room to renovate, it is choosing which $20,000 earns its money back and which $60,000 does not.

That is the part we can actually help with, and it is usually a shorter list than people expect. Fresh paint, floors and a kitchen that photographs well have carried more Sonoma County sales than any primary suite ever has. If you are within a year of selling, it is worth half an hour before you spend anything.

New Listings

Half an Acre, a Pool, and a Dead-End Street Ten Minutes From the Plaza

620 Alta Vista Drive, Healdsburg. $1,295,000. Three bedrooms, two and a half baths, 2,208 square feet on 0.52 acres.

Single-storey, built in 1985, and just refreshed: new paint inside and out, a remodelled kitchen, new flooring. The lot is the story. Just over half an acre on a quiet dead-end street off Hassett Lane, with views out over the surrounding Wine Country and enough flat ground that the back garden works as an actual destination rather than a strip of lawn.

That back garden has an in-ground pool and a built-in spa, a patio big enough to feed a crowd, garden beds and room left over. It is ten minutes from the Healdsburg Plaza, which is the trick this address pulls off: the space and quiet of a residential lane, with the restaurants and tasting rooms close enough that guests can walk back.

What actually sets it apart:

• Just over half an acre inside Healdsburg, which almost never comes up at this price

• In-ground pool and built-in spa, already there, nothing to build

• Dead-end street, no through traffic, single storey throughout

• No HOA, public sewer, two-car garage and parking for four

Bring people. There is room for them, and a pool to put them in.

New Listings

On the Market This Week

1650 Jonive Rd, Sebastopol | $2,885,000
A large home in the redwoods in coveted west county, apple-and-vine country.

7616 Hwy 128, Healdsburg | $2,575,000
The perfect wine country home for entertaining with pool and every outdoor living amenity imaginable

3229 W Dry Creek Rd, Healdsburg | $1,995,000
Modern luxury meets peaceful Wine Country living on six private acres.

2016 Eagle Ct, Santa Rosa | $1,675,000
New 2026 single-story with owned solar, ten-foot ceilings, and a third of an acre of blank canvas

16530 Laughlin Rd, Guerneville | $1,495,000
A rare Guerneville property with a pool overlooking a vineyard.

2563 Mill Creek Rd, Healdsburg | $1,400,000
Mill Creek Road seclusion west of Healdsburg, and a great vacation rental.

516 Grove St, Healdsburg | $1,395,000
Walkable Healdsburg under $1.5M, close to the plaza, the perfect pied-a-terre.

14183 Chalk Hill Road, Healdsburg | $1,295,000
A creek-fronted, remodeled retreat on a private oak-shaded lot offering rare seclusion and water frontage

620 Alta Vista Dr, Healdsburg | $1,295,000
Spacious house within minutes of the plaza with views and a pool.

9239 Lakewood Dr, Windsor | $599,000
Entry level price point in one of Windsor's most desirable neighborhoods with an abundance of amenities.

180 Johnson St, Windsor | $525,000
The rare sub-$600k entry point in Windsor, the county's tightest, fastest-moving price band.

Lifestyle News

What's Happening

Mamma Mia!, closing weekend
Where: Field of Dreams, 151 1st St W, Sonoma
When: Friday 28, Saturday 29 and Sunday 30 August, 7 p.m.
Why: The last three nights of the outdoor Broadway run in the city of Sonoma. ABBA, under the stars, one weekend left.

Roger Daltrey, A Great Night Out
Where: Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa
When: Friday 4 September, 7.30 p.m.
Why: The Who's frontman, with Amy Helm opening, in a room twenty minutes from Healdsburg. People still assume you have to drive to San Francisco for this.

Windsor Chili Cook-Off, 13th year
Where: Windsor Town Green, Market Street, Windsor
When: Saturday 12 September, 12 p.m. to 4 p.m., $20 in advance
Why: Amateur and professional teams, live music, local beer and wine, proceeds to Our Village Closet. The Town Green doing what it does best.

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David & Jonathan here – the guys who write about real estate but really just want to talk about our favorite taco trucks. Hit us up about anything Sonoma County (or beyond). Whether you're buying, selling, or just want to know which wineries actually welcome dogs – we've got you covered.