Silicon Valley has had it's ups and downs, along with the rest of the nation, that's for sure.

In fact, you could say Silicon Valley IS a housing market of ups and downs -- ups and downs at the same time. Some regions of the 15-city county are up, others are down in terms of home sales, home prices or both.

But the more telling characteristic from technology's ground zero is that the region has shaped up as California's strongest housing market.

That could mean it'll be the first in the Golden State to see better days.

The median price of single-family homes in closed sales was $815,000 in March, in Silicon Valley, according to Richard Calhoun.

Calhoun, owner of Creekside Realty in San Jose, publishes the statistical Bay Area Real Estate Newsletter.

He says Silicon Valley's March price is just 6 percent off the region's peak record price of about $870,000 set nearly a year ago in April 2007.

In contrast, the latest figures from the California Association of Realtors reveals that over the past year, home prices fell 20 percent or more in 8 out of the 20 regions the association tracks throughout the state.

Among all the regions, Silicon Valley had the smallest decline in home prices statewide over the past year.

The paltry number of single-family home sales in Silicon Valley, 583 in March, was the lowest number of completed transactions for any March since 1998. Another indicator the market is at or near the bottom.

Good schools, job centers and related technology incomes clustered in the region's northwest quadrant continued to cause a market split.

The northwest continues to see home prices at or near record highs.

On the other hand, Calhoun said the eastern, central and south Silicon Valley regions have suffered home value declines as much as 20 percent in the past year.

Published: April 14, 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.