Healdsburg Market Report

Healdsburg residential real estate includes everything from humble bungalows smaller than 1000 square feet to sprawling vineyard estate compounds with multiple houses, pools, stables, and vineyards worth more than $100,000 per acre. It's hard to look at any short period of time and try to pull useful decision-making intelligence from averages or medians with such a complex market.

Instead, let's look at a longer time frame and look at trends across different price segments. I chose to use an annual quartile analysis and see what we could learn about Healdsburg residential market trends that span the bubble in housing prices.

I only captured the tail end of 2006, so the numbers are a little spiky. The red line starts out at nearly $400,000 for Quartile-1, the low end of the market. What we are seeing is the near panic to get a house, any house, before prices rose too high to qualify. Lots of buyers were competing for any available home and the low end of the market was the most accessible. Better qualified buyers had already gotten their homes, for the most part, so the action at the bottom was intense.

2007 shows a full year's worth of data and makes a good starting point for tracking the fall from the height of the bubble. Look at the year from the red Quartile 1 at under $100,000 to the top blue line representing Quartile-4 at over a million dollars. That spread of nearly $1,000,000 represents the maximum spread of Healdsburg real estate values. We see a relatively uniform spread between the other quartiles as well. $500,000 represents the 2nd quartile and $685,000 the third quartile.

You can track the bubble deflation through 2008 into 2009. The lowest quartile strengthens and maintains a steady presence in the low hundred thousand dollar range. The other quartiles decline at nearly the same rate and by 2009 on the chart, the spread between high and low has been reduced from $1,000,000 in 2007 to $650,000. Since then, the market has been quite stable with only the second quartile showing a measurable decline of about $35,000.

The end result is that Healdsburg has a more compressed pricing environment. You will still pay in the millions for estate grade properties at the top of the market, but the spread in the middle of the market is reduced from the extremes of the bubble.

This 2011 healdsburg residential sales chart only reflects sales that have been reported to the MLS, so several sales of over $6,000,000 are not shown.