Dave Roberts

The big surge in foreclosed homes we have been told is coming has been a big yawn so far in Sonoma County. Buyers are aggressively bidding for decently priced homes on the market and sales are brisk. As an example of the drying up of REO inventory, there are less than 100 bank owned single family homes for sale in Sonoma County. That's down from 160 in April and 300 or more in January. That translates to a couple dozen foreclosed homes for sale in Rohnert Park or Windsor. When your home buying universe shrinks to that few to choose from, you can get frustrated easily. The reports of a surge of new foreclosure default filings in Sonoma County is welcome news to buyers (if not delinquent owners), but the homes in question are a long way from hitting the market.

The reality is that if you're looking for a great value REO home you are going to be fighting other smart buyers, both investors and first time buyers, who are looking for the same thing. On the street that means that the first days a new REO listing has been posted is going to be a scramble as real estate agents stack up with their buyers to get a look and figure out not just if they want to make a bid, but how much of an overbid they may have to make. It's clear there is a lot of pent up demand for affordable housing.

I'm curious about other parts of the country. Are you seeing a new wave of foreclosures? Are you still dealing with multiple offers and overbids?

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Mayacama is Sonoma County's premier luxury neighborhood. This very exclusive community of less than twenty fabulous homes surrounds a Jack Nicklaus Signature golf course that is ranked #4 on Travel & Leisure Golf’s “Top 100 Community Courses” . In addition to the golf, residents enjoy a wine club with vintner members that need 90 points or higher in Wine Spectator scores to join. Great golf, great wine, and great food combine with a spa, heated pools, tennis courts, and other amenities to support a luxurious, wine country lifestyle that is unrivaled anywhere.

Mayacama is located within ten minutes of the Santa Rosa airport and is only 59 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, so access isn't complicated. The Santa Rosa Airport is serviced by Horizon Air flights from Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Seattle. Many of the owners here have their own aircraft, and the Santa Rosa Airport has sufficient capability to handle private aircraft.

Mayacama consists of 32 lots spread across 675 acres. The homes are primarily Tuscan inspired and by design are around 3,600 square feet each. The homes are spread throughout the property to provide privacy to each residence. Gary Scenti is one of my fellow agents at Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty. He's intimately familiar with the Mayacama homes and golf course. In fact, he blogs about golfing at Mayacama on his mayacamahomes.com blog. He has the listing for what may be the nicest site and home on the property. You can see the rear of the home and the pool deck in the top picture. See a Slideshow or an aerial tour.

Listing Details

Sonoma County is agricultural heaven. Famed horticulturist Luther Burbank went so far as to say about Sonoma County, "This is the chosen spot of all this earth as far as Nature is concerned. I won't disagree. For those who are looking for an acre or two of this gardening paradise, Sebastopol stands out among all the others. For a host of reasons, including the failure of apple growers to make enough profit from their work, many Sebastopol country properties were broken into smaller parcels before zoning laws were enacted to preserve large farms. Other agricultural towns, like Healdsburg, simply don't have a lot of small parcels available.

Sebastopol country property surrounds the town of Sebastopol, but is more sparse in the direction of Santa Rosa. The Laguna de Santa Rosa occupies a vast tract of land between those cities, so your best searching will be on Highway 116 leading into Sebastopol, Highway 12 heading towards the coast, or Highway 116 on the way to Graton and Forestville. There are a multitude of smaller roads between these major arteries, each with a feel and character of its own.

To really understand this area and get a feel for the microclimates and neighborhoods, a bike ride is ideal for exploring the back roads. The major roads are a little busy with regular traffic for me to recommend bicycling, but the smaller roads have an easier pace. Still, ride carefully. If you can't take a bike ride, an old fashioned Sunday drive crisscrossing the countryside between Graton, Occidental, Freestone, Bloomfield, and Hessell will give you a strong flavor of the different neighborhoods. You may even run into some friendly live stock along the way.

Property isn't cheap here. The schools are top notch, which always spurs demand for property from active parents. Politically, the local citizenry is involved with their town and national events.There's a great shopping variety in town including several locally owned markets, national grocery chains, and a Whole Foods. Local businesses include O'Reilly Media, the source of more Hello World programming beginnings than any other entity in the world.

Healdsburg's Dry Creek Valley is home to great wineries, great scenery, and some truly great vineyard estate homes. It's also home to more modest farmhouses for the grape growers and other residents who work in the wine industry. Make no mistake, wine and grapes are the heart and soul of this area. If you're not growing, processing, tasting, or selling wine, you might as well look somewhere else for a home. This map based search for Dry Creek Valley homes for sale will help you see what is on the market today.

Dry Creek Valley is a very discrete, geographically limited region. At the south-east end is the city of Healdsburg (shown on the aerial photo). At the north-west end is Warm Springs Dam, the blocking force that created Lake Sonoma, a wonderful source of recreation, water, and flood control for the area. The hills rising up on each side of Dry Creek Valley are the other boundaries that define this appellation and the neighborhood. Dry Creek Road on the north and W Dry Creek Road on the south west side of the valley are the two country roads that service this area.

The agricultural nature of this valley has always meant large parcel sizes. You can see this clearly on the aerial photo of the valley. That continues to be the case today, so most residential real estate comes with either vineyards or forests. There are a few smaller parcels with an acre or less, but for the most part, a big component of the price you pay for property is going to be in the land.

The property has more than 20 acres planted to premium, award winning Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc vines. There is a wine making barn with the potential to convert this property from a vineyard to a 5,000 case per year wine-making operation for buyers who are serious about the wine business.

The other end of the valley, close-in to Healdsburg along W. Dry Creek Rd, is another wonderful wine-centric property. This estate was built on the aesthetics of lodges like the Ahwanee Hotel in Yosemite.

Large scale rooms and ample use of wood and stone make this striking estate memorable. There are grapes here as well; more than 10 acres of Syrah in contract with the neighboring winery. This estate also has a guest house, orchards, and other outbuildings. Details

It's hard to find homes for sale in Dry Creek Valley. The neighborhood is reasonably large in area, but there are relatively few residences because of the large parcel sizes. If you are willing to take the time and energy to build your own home there are some great Dry Creek Valley land parcels waiting for your dream home.

Kawana Springs and the post-world war II subdivision just north of it represent two sides of the entry level home market in Santa Rosa. They are blocks apart physically, but miles apart in terms of amenities, style, price, and maintenance. Location unites them, but so does the attractiveness of both sets of homes as entry level housing in Santa Rosa.

The area that was named Stellar Gardens in the early 1950's includes Santa Ana, Santa Barbara, San Domingo, Elsinore, Moraga, and San Clemente Drives. These were very modest homes, even when they were new. On the other hand, their relatively small square footage (877 to 1177 square feet) and nice sized lots (.13 to .25 of an acre) promised an upgrade in the future to returning GI's as the second wave of the Boomer babies were being born. Progress passed them by, however, as new subdivisions drew the growing families into larger homes in Santa Rosa and newly built Rohnert Park. These homes became rentals, for the most part, but during the housing boom they escalated wildly in price and became over-priced, owner-occupied homes for people who didn't want to get left behind as housing appreciated in value. Sadly, the dream turned to nightmare for most of the buyers who paid in the $400,000-$450,000 range for homes that are now selling for $125,000-$150,000. This neighborhood is ground zero for the no-doc loans and 100% financing that helped fuel the bubble.

The bubble victims are mainly gone. Banks have either taken ownership or already sold these foreclosed properties to new buyers. The still modest homes often have illegal garage conversions, dilapidated facades, cracked concrete driveways and patios, and failing roofs. In spite of those common problems, these houses offer the bottom rung on the ladder to home ownership that many people are seeking. The first time home buyer tax credit of $8,000 represents as much as 5-6% of the homes value. Free.

A 10% down payment is only $12,500 for the low end of this market, and that's only about twice as much as the initial deposits to rent an apartment. If you qualify for the excellent rates available today, your house payment, including taxes and insurance, can be less than $1,000 per month. That's a good value in anybody's budget.

Kawana Springs represents a more modern version of the same story. The streets are named for semi-precious stones like Amethyst Way, Lapis Lane, and Malachite Way. These homes were built to capitalize on the housing boom in the early 2001-2003 time frame. They are also modest in scale with most of them being between 1240 and 1698 square feet sitting on small lots of .08 to .107 acres in size. A typical value progression for this subdivision was for a home to sell for $250,000 in 2000, for $550,000 during the bubble height, and to now be sold for $300,000. Current real estate prices reflect significant losses for the buyers who purchased during the bubble peak, but are in line with long term real estate appreciation in Sonoma County.

These are great first time buyer homes for people who can qualify for the higher payments on a house that is selling for around $300,000. These are almost new, and the maintenance costs should be lower than older homes for many years. The neighborhood itself reflects that all the homes were built in 2000 or more recently, so it's in generally excellent repair and appearance.

These two neighborhoods will appeal to buyers with different budgets, but they are both useful ways to get started in the housing market in Santa Rosa.

Homes for Sale in Kawana Springs