Families looking for good schools and friendly neighborhoods often look at Rohnert Park and Windsor, the two cities that bracket Santa Rosa on the south and north. Both are reasonably recent towns built during the last half of the last century. Windsor is slightly newer, but Rohnert Park has Sonoma State University and better proximity to Marin and San Francisco.
They have each struggled with the crash of the housing bubble and I wanted to look at the numbers to see the state of the market. I pulled all the sold listings from July through September of 2009 for single family homes selling for less than $300,000.
I was surprised most of all by the vitality of Rohnert Park. The transactions at the entry level of the market continue on a torrid pace of overbidding that makes it hard for first time buyers to compete. At the same time, however, it shows a very healthy interest in home ownership and investment.
What you see in this chart is an average overbid of about $13,000 in Rohnert Park, and an average underbid in Windsor of about -$4,000. Even though Windos starts off with a higher average listing price (in the less than $300,000 price range), the average selling price ends up higher in Rohnert Park. I don't think you can draw a lot of conclusions from this. If I were advising first time buyers on a limited budget where they should be looking at property, I might steer them to Windsor just to avoid getting into as many bidding wars.
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