There's a growing pot of gold in Silicon Valley's housing market, a region that could very well become one of the nation's first major metropolitan areas to take some of the rust out of the housing bust.

Ground zero for high-tech innovation and even higher incomes, Silicon Valley has a growing abundance of homes for sale, sellers in the area are more motivated to sell and mortgage interest rates are cooperating, according to local real estate leaders.

On average, homes in the Silicon Valley area are selling for 98 percent of the asking price.

During boom times, the average selling price was more than 100 percent of the asking price, according to the Bay Area Real Estate Market Newsletter, produced by Richard Calhoun, broker of Creekside Realty in San Jose, CA.

Silicon Valley's ground zero, California's Santa Clara County, revealed that December 2007 home sales were more than 40 percent below the number of sales a year earlier, allowing inventories to remain near the record high levels set in October 2007, according to Calhoun.

It's the volume of homes for sale that is creating price breaks in a growing number of communities, generally represented by the yellow and green areas of softening prices on Trulia.com's "Heat Map".

December's median price for Silicon Valley's single-family homes, $799,000 was well off the record $880,000 median set in May 2007. Condo prices have likewise seen a down turn, from a record of nearly $550,000 in November to $520,000 in December this year, according to Calhoun's Bay Area Real Estate Market Newsletter.

Giving buyers more leverage, mortgage interest rates are the lowest they've been since September, 2005, according to Freddie Mac.

Silicon Valley buyers with high credit scores, unblemished credit reports, steady employment, low debt-to-income ratios, and ample savings can do even better than average rates, according to David Walsh, president of the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors.

Published: January 21, 2008

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Broderick Perkins parlayed a career in old-school journalism into a contemporary digital news service that really hits home. The award-winning consumer journalist, originally from Wilmington, DE, is founder, publisher and executive editor of the bootstrap DeadlineNews Group, a Silicon Valley-based editorial content and consulting service specializing in residential real estate, consumer news and related editorial consulting services. The DeadlineNews Group includes the website, DeadlineNews.com, offering real estate editorial content and consulting services, and its back shop, the Deadline Newsroom, an open house on news that really hits home. Perkins obtained his formal journalism education from University of Delaware and a journalism boot camp, the Institute of Journalism Education at the University of California-Berkeley. He went on to 20 years of service as a daily newspaper journalist at the Wilmington, DE News Journal and San Jose, CA Mercury News. Perkins covered housing on the San Jose Mercury News reporting team which earned a General News Reporting Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He has also produced real estate, consumer and small business content for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, RealtyTimes.com, Nolo.com, Better Homes and Gardens, the National Association of Realtors, Homestore/Move and Intuit/Quicken among more than three dozen publications. In addition to managing the DeadlineNews Group, Perkins most recently served as chief editorial consultant for Nolo's Essential Guide To Buying Your First Home, Nolo, and writes real estate television scripts for RealtyTimes.com.