The Average Price of a Home in Menlo Park, CA Reached $2.35m in the First Quarter

It's fueled by Janet Yellen money printing and a new Facebook office complex in the city.

FT considers the Facebook angle:

In March, thousands of Facebook employees began moving into the tech firm’s gleaming new office in Menlo Park, a small city of about 33,000 people, approximately 30 miles south of San Francisco. Designed by Frank Gehry, the cavernous 434,000 sq ft complex, with raw-steel beams and 22ft-high ceilings, sits just across from the company’s main headquarters and is already being hailed as an architectural gem. Yet the building symbolises much more than the social networking company’s fondness for modern architecture.

 Since moving its headquarters to Menlo Park four years ago, Facebook has led a building boom that has added thousands of high-paying jobs to the city, while helping to push residential real estate values to record levels. The company says about half of its 10,000-strong global workforce now work out of Menlo Park...

The average price of a home in Menlo Park reached $2.35m in the first quarter of this year, a rise of 19 per cent from the same period in 2014 and 52 per cent higher from 2013, according to the San Mateo County Association of Realtors with data from MLSListings. Average home prices have nearly doubled — up 96.4 per cent — since 2011, the year Facebook moved its headquarters from nearby Palo Alto...Menlo Park’s property rise comes amid another economic boom across the wider Silicon Valley area.

 The job growth rate in the area grew 4.1 per cent in 2014, the highest since 2000, adding almost 58,000 jobs, according to think-tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley. The average annual income reached $116,033, compared with $61,489 in the US as a whole, the study shows. 

“All the strong economic data are creating one of the most frenzied real estate markets since the dotcom boom,” says Penelope Huang, an estate agent at Re/Max Distinctive Properties who has been a broker in the area for 26 years. “We’re seeing the same kinds of bidding wars and sharply rising prices that we saw over a decade ago.”